Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray

.w

A LAUREL

50« EDITION

Sigmund Freud Erich

Fromm

Margaret Mead Albert

Camus

Reinhold NIebuhr Robert Briffault Denis de Rougemont D. H. Lawrence

M. C. D'Arcy Tiieodor Reik

and 12 other authorities.

An

original

collection of brilliant

essays,

edited by A.

M. Krich

^c^?i..0l£^C}0l>uu^

What

is

Love?

Malinowski, de Rougemont,

Mead and

the social anthropologists answer:

it

is

sexual love; the troubadours' songs; jeal-

ousy; matrimony, both primitive and civilized.

Freud, Reik,

Homey, Fromm and the psy-

chologists answer:

love

is

neurotic and

normal, productive and destructive.

De

Beauvoir, D'Arcy, Niebuhr and the

philosophers answer: life

of

power

its

men and women, for

good or

ARON KRiCH, practices

it is

is

who Compiled

this

a psychologist

who

psychotherapy

and

New York

City.

counseling in editor of the

the major

ill.

ED.D.,

unique collection,

role differs in the

but

marriage

He is the companion volumes Women

and Men: The Variety and Meaning of Their Sexual Experience; The Homosexuals; and with Emily H. Mudd, Man and Wife: A Sourcebook of Family Attitudes, Sexual Behavior and Marriage Counseling.

Other Dell Books edited by A. M. Krich

men: The

Variety and

Meaning

of Their Sexual Experience (D15, 35c)

women: The

Variety and

Meaning

of Their Sexual Experience (D3, 35c)

A

collection of essays

edited by A,

The Anatomy

A

of

M. Krich

Love

LAUREL EDITION

Published by

DELL PUBLISHING

CO., INC.

750 Third Avenue New York, N.Y.

©

Copyright, 1960, by

Laurel

(§)

TM,

Aron Krich

Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

Acknowledgments

for permissions to use the

selections in this anthology appear at the

end of the

editor's introduction to

each

selection.

Designed and produced by Western Printing & Lithographing Company

Cover design by Seymour Chwast

—February,

First printing

1960

Printed in U.S.A.

dedication:

For Toby and John Colin Krich

1

Contents

7

Preface

PART one: the ways of love 1.

Bronislaw Malinowski

From 2.

Instinct to Sentiment

Robert

Brifiault

From Sex 3.

C.

S.

to

Love

3

47

Floyd Dell

Love 5.

in Religion

Lewis

Courtly Love 4.

13

in the

Margaret

Machine Age

68

Mead

Jealousy: Primitive and Civilized 6.

86

Denis de Rougemont

The

Crisis of the

Modern Couple

103

PART two: the meanings of love 7.

John Bowlby Child Care and the Growth of Love

8.

Therese Benedek

9.

Ives Hendrick

The Psychodynamics Psychosexuality 10.

of

Love

118

128

137

Sigmund Freud The Mdst Prevalent Form 150 Erotic Life

of Degradation in

S 11.

Theodor Reik Love and Sex Are Different

164

12.

Ian Suttie

13.

Karen Horney The Neurotic Need for Affection

The Function and Expression

14.

16.

Love

181

191

Fromm

Erich

Productive Love 15.

of

200

PhUip Q. Roche The Meanings of Love

209

Karl Menninger

Love

against

222

Hate

PART three: the power of love 17.

D. H. Lawrence

Love and Let Love 18.

19.

M.

Love

Mind and Heart

of Love'*

21

Reinhold Niebuhr

Love 22.

260

C. D'Arcy

Preface to "The 21.

250

Pitirim Sorokin Altruistic

20.

245

Simone de Beauvoir The Woman in Love

as a Possibility for the Individual

Albert

Camus

Love and Rebellion Index of

Names

304

318

290

Preface

do not know what people call love," Tolstoy confesses it is what I have read and heard about, then I have never experienced it." But on another page he Had a glimpse of A. very attractive. Have enters: ", waited all these days. Today in the big old wood. I am a fool, a brute. Her bronzed flush and her eyes. I am in love as never before in my life. Have no other thought. Am tor"I

in his Diary. "If

.

—

.

mented."

With

—

moral conclusion, Tolstoy in stirred until an amazing age never did resolve the conflict between sense and spirit. In his posthumously published novelette, The Devil, he is still wrestling with the issue of what love is or ought to be. He cannot decide which of two equally inevitable endings to give his story. Shall the obsessed hero end his torment by murdering the vibrant peasant woman who is the object of his overwhelming passion? Or shall he destroy his desire by destroying himself? Tolstoy wrote two endings and left them both for us to choose. This inward struggle between natural lusts and the social ideal to which man aspires has been a central consideration of those writers who, by unmasking the disguises of love, have done so much to modify the modem sensibility. Despite his protest of ignorance, has anyone written more penetrating and moving love scenes than the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace? Every lover, impatient

whom,

—

all

his genius for

ironically, the

Old

Adam

with questions that challenge the uniqueness of his love, still asks within himself, like Tolstoy, whether what he is experiencing has that secret quality which gives it something in conmion with what others call love. Reluctantly, feeling that "only another lover with love like my own can understand,** he turns to books. But what books? "Love appears in aU literature,*' Father D'Arcy teUs us later, "not as a passing episode but as the

8

Preface

marrow of it. But with what a bewildering variety of incident and type!" In a complex and often symbolic universe of inevitability, love remains the personal choice, the gesture of self against situation. To the mirror of art we constantly turn, proving La Rochefoucauld's maxim that no one would fall in love unless he had heard about it from someone else. Indeed, there is every reason to concede that romance, without which we now believe the world would slip its orbit, is a rather recent invention of poets. When in the twelfth century unsatisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of Provence in the center of the poetic conception of love, the history of civilization was turned in a new direction. is the place of love in human life, the investinature has, for the most part, been left in the hands of creative writers. Rich as this source is in description, it is poor in explication. In a work of art we must feel our way through its ambiguities, discovering at its heart not answers but further questions to put to ourselves. For, to paraphrase John Dewey, art expresses the meanings which science seeks to state. The "ruder hands" of science have made some beginnings at molding intuition into knowledge. But with a phenomenon described as being "a universe inexhaustible qualitatively and quantitatively," the difficulties involved are understandable. What is puzzling is the taboo which seems to cloak love from the eyes of those sciences which might tell us much if they would approach it. This brief excerpt from a remarkable exchange between Dr. Karl Menninger and the late Professor Alfred Kinsey, taken from a transcript of a round-table discussion ("Psychiatric Implications of Surveys on Sexual Behavior") at a 1954 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, points up the problem:

Crucial as

gation of

its

Dr. Menninger:

Many

of us psychiatrists consider that not orgasm, or not reproduction, but still a third thing, the acme of some kind of inner personal intimacy between two human beings. I am sorry to use a taboo word which nobody has mentioned yet, but there is such a thing as love! Dr. [O. Spurgeon] Engthe goal of sexuality

is

^

Preface

9

"orgasm" is a taboo word, but if he is going to be courageous enough to introduce it, I will be courageous enough to introduce the word "love" into the discussion. It seems to me that it, too, has something to do with sexual life. Dr. Kinsey will say: "We have no evidence of any such thing as love in the Hymenoptera and Coleoptera and so forth." Maybe not. I do not know about them. I, as a psychiatrist, am of the opinion we have considerable lish said

evidence that there

is

such a thing as love in

human

be-

and this really brings up a philosophical difference which I am not sure can be bridged by any amount of ings,

discussion.

.

.

.

In rebuttal, Professor Kinsey objected that such criticism denied the right of the scientist to confine himself to phenomena which are amenable to the scientific method of observation directly, or indirectly, with human sense organs and reduction to quantifiable units. Prof. Kinsey: But, we are asked, how can one measure love? The question seems to suggest that we are ignorant of the importance of love. In actuality, however, it means that there are persons who object to any scientific study

of the quantifiable aspects of sexual behavior unless, as have already remarked, the scientist is willing to turn

I

philosopher, poet and moralist, and write an essay on the as yet non-quantifiable aspects of such behavior. There are, of course, at least 2,000 treatises on love already in existence. They begin with ancient Sanskrit literature, include the love books of Ovid, and books written by present-day critics of our research. These latter persons compliment us when they imply that the books they have written are so inadequate that we should write

something more on the subject. Professor Kinsey's

comment has

considerable bearing on

the impetus behind the organization of this book. Because of the resistance to the ineffable nature of love which Ian Suttie has

termed "the taboo on tenderness," and

its

rele-

10 'Preface gation to an epistemological limbo of the "impure" and unprecise, we have gone to the "poet, philosopher and moralist" to whom Dr. Kinsey assigns the gift of assessing the

"non-quantifiable" aspects of

human

behavior.

To them we

have added the anthropologist, the sociologist, the historian, the theologian, and particularly, the psychologist and psychiatrist, including

Dr. Menninger himself,

ing our understanding of love as a

who

are enlarg-

dynamic force within

the individual and his society.

For an

anthologist,

Dr. Kinsey's remarks raise again

what books we should open to learn about wonder which of the "2,000 treatises on love" are

the question of love.

We

represented here? Perusing the Kinsey team's otherwise magnificent bibliographies we encounter few significant works on love. Those of recent date appear to be instructional tracts. On the other hand, if we pick up the clue offered by Professor Kinsey's reference to "ancient Sanskrit literature"

in

mind

and Ovid,

it

seems that he must have had

the heritage of "love books," as they are called,

which deal with the vicissitudes, techniques and curiosities of the amatory relations between the sexes. The concern of these mellow tomes with the lustier nuances of the chase

them a ribald tone. Under this rubric a generous sampling from them has already been compiled by the gives

present editor.*

These older works cannot tell us what we want to know because when they were conceived love, as we think of it today, simply did not exist. Plato, whose ideas, of all the ancients, come closest to our own, speaks of a love which does not include women at all! Given the status of woman before the Middle Ages and in some ways well into the modern era this prehistory of love is best understood when juxtaposed against an elaborately structured combination of homosexuality, prostitution and adultery. "The belief in the immense value of the lady," Bertrand Russell

—

—

has noted, "is a psychological effect of the difficulty of obI think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling taining her, and

1 See The Ribald Reader, New York, Dell First Edition. 1954, and The Second Ribald Reader, New York, Dell First Edition, 1956.

1

Preface

1

toward her does not take the form of romantic love. Romantic love, as it appears in the Middle Ages, was not directed at first toward women with whom the lover could have either legitimate or illegitimate sexual relations; it was directed toward women of the highest respectability who were separated from their romantic lovers by insuperable barriers of morality and convention." Where, then, if we have not gone either to the sensualistic, the misogynous or the chivalric "treatises" on love, have we turned for the material which follows? In its infiniteness love leaves its mark on every sphere of human activity. "It is," as Paul TiUich well says, "life itself in its actual unity." We have found it in a novelist's essay on rebellion (Camus); in a scholar's thesis on allegory (Lewis); in a physician's survey of maternal care (Bowlby); in an anthropologist's study of primitive sexual myths (MaUnowski) in a sermon on ethics (Niebuhr) in a woman's protest against her fate (de Beauvoir) in the clinical exploration of the unconscious mind (Freud), and so on. We have ;

;

;

selected considerations of the

on which

phenomena

of love

from the

operates and influences our lives. First, as an inherited tradition and social condition; second, as a need and capacity of the individual; and, third, as a three levels

it

symbol and paradigm of human existence. Of love's many forms, which Pitirim Sorokin subtly

dif-

ferentiates as "religious, ethical, ontological, physical, bio-

psychological and social," the contributors have is, I beUeve, little of import left to say in these prefatory remarks. The content of this volume ranges from the ontological conception of love, in which love is assigned a creative power that makes it the essence of being, uniting separates and unifying the meaningless, to the profound simplicity of an embrace. Between the far reaches of its metaphysical implications and its direct, intimate impact as an individual experience, we have tried to mark a few of the innumerable ways that meet, lose themselves, and branch again to become the road logical,

written so thoughtfully that there

to love.

Our debt to all of the contributors to this volume is, of course, primary. In addition, we should hke to thank the

12

Preface

various

organizations

and

individuals,

particularly

the

Technical Publications Section of the World Health Organization, Mrs. Robert Briffault, and Dr. Margaret Mead, for their generosity in nally, I

making material

available to us. Fi-

wish to acknowledge the special role of

Frank Taylor, in book we have done

my own

editor,

significantly enriching this,

sixth

together.

ARON KRICH,

ED.D.

the

part one

The Ways of Love

l.From

Instinct to

Sentiment

Bronislaw Malinowski

How

our complex customs of courtship, the marriage bond and the continuities of family life anticipate and extend biological tendencies, is traced by Professor Malinowski from the selective mating of apes to the community of interests which unites the human couple. While the taboos and restraints imposed by culture seemingly oppose the natural impulses of sex, Malinowski shows that in the long run they serve the same function of safeguarding the species as do the more automatic release mechanisms of animals. In man sexual strivings are channeled by cultural inducements which, as we shall see in ensuing chapters, vary considerably in each society and historical period. These innumerable ways of love arise out of the plasticity of man's instincts which permits them to be molded into sentiments ^those constantly changing emotional attitudes which gov-

—

ern the universal romance of hfe. pioneer cultural anthropologist, probably the first to apply psychoanalytic theory to the study of primitive life, Dr. Malinowski is most famous for his work with the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea reported in a number of major works including Crime and Customs in Savage Society, The Sexual Life of Savages, and Magic, Science and

A

Religion.

From Sex and Repression in Savage Society by Bronislaw Malinowski. Reprinted by permission of The Humanities Press, Inc.

From 1.

Instinct to

Rut and Mating

Sentiment in

Animal and

Man

Let us compare the chain of linked instinctive responses which in animals constitute courtship, marriage and famDy with the corresponding human institutions. Let us, point after point, go over each link in the love-making and family Ufe of anthropoid apes and ascertain what in human beings corresponds to each. Among apes the courtship begins with a change in the female organism, determined by physiological factors and automatically releasing the sexual response in, the male. The male then proceeds to court according to the selective type of wooing which prevails in a given species. In this all the individuals who are within the range of influence take part, because they are irresistibly attracted by the condition of the female. Rut provides opportunities for display on the part of the males and for selection on the part of the female. All the factors which define animal behaviour at this stage are

common

to

all

individuals of the species.

They work with such uniformity cies

one

set of data

zoologist, while,

that for each animal speand only one has to be given by the

on the other hand, they vary considerably

from one

new

species to another, so that for each species a description is necessary. But within the species the

whether individual or otherwise, are so small and irrelevant that the zoologist ignores them and is fully

variations,

justified in

doing

so.

Could an anthropologist provide such a formula for the mechanism of courtship and mating in the human species? Obviously not. It is sufficient to open any book referring to the sexual life of humanity, whether it be the classical works of Havelock ElUs, Westermarck, and Frazer or the excellent description in Crawley's Mystic Rose, to find that there are innumerable forms of courtship and marriage,

love-makmg are different, that types of wooing and winning vary with each culture. To the zoologist that seasons of

From the species

is

Instinct to Sentiment

the unit, to the anthropologist the unit

is

15 the

culture. In other words, the zoologist deals with specific instinctive behaviour, the anthropologist with a culturally

fashioned habit-response. Let us examine this in greater detail. In the first place we see that in man there is no season of rut, which means that man is ready to make love at any time and woman to respond to him a condition which, as we all know, does not simplify human intercourse. There is nothing in man which acts with the same sharp determination as does the onset of ovulation in any mammalian female. Does this mean, however, that there is anything approaching indiscriminate mating in any human society? We know that even in the most licentious cultures nothing like "promiscuity" exists or could ever have existed. In every human culture we find, first of all, systems of well-defined taboos which rigidly separate a number of people of opposite sexes and exclude whole categories of potential partners. The most important of these taboos completely excludes from mating those people who are normally and naturally in contact, that is, the members of the same family, parents from children, and brothers from sisters. As an extension of this, we find in a number of primitive societies a wider prohibition of sex intercourse which debars whole groups of people from any sex relations. This is the law of exogamy. Next in importance to the taboo of incest is the prohibition of adultery. While the first serves to guard the family, the second serves for the protection of marriage. But culture does not exercise a merely negative influence upon the sexual impulse. In each community we find also inducements to courtship and to amorous interest besides the prohibitions and exclusions. The various festive seasons, times of dancing and personal display, periods when food is lavishly consumed and stimulants used, are as a rule also the signal for erotic pursuits. At such seasons large numbers of men and women congregate and young men are brought in contact with girls from beyond the circle of the family and of the local group. Very often some of the usual restraints are lifted and boys and girls are allowed to meet unhampered and uncontrolled. Indeed,

—

Bronislaw Malinowski

16

such seasons naturally encourage courtship by means of the stimulants, the artistic pursuits,

Thus the

and the

festive

mood.

signal for courtship, the release of the process

is given not by a mere bodily change but by a combination of cultural influences. In the last instance these influences obviously act upon the human body and stimulate innate reactions in that they provide physical proximity, mental atmosphere, and appropriate suggestions; unless the organism were ready to respond sexually no cultural influences could make man mate. But, instead of an automatic physiological mechanism, we have a complicated arrangement into which artificial elements have been largely introduced. Two points, therefore, must be noted:

of mating,

biological release mechanism in man, but combined psychological and physiological process determined in its temporal, spatial, and formal nature by cultural tradition; associated with it and supplementing it is a system of cultural taboos which limit considerably the working of the sexual impulse. Let us inquire now what is the biological value of rut for an animal species and what are the consequences for

there

is

no purely

instead there

man

of

its

is

a

absence. In

all

animal species mating has to be

must be opportunities for comparison and for choice with either sex. Both male and female must have a chance to display his or her charms, to exercise attractions, to compete for the chosen one. Colour, voice, physical strength, cunning and agility in combat each a symptom of bodily vigour and organic perfection determine the choice. Mating by choice, again, is an indispenselective,

i.e.

there

— —

sable counterpart of natural selection, for without

rangement for

some

ar-

mating the species would degenerate. This necessity increases as we ascend the scale of organic evolution; in the lowest animals there is not even the need for pairing. It is clear, therefore, that in the highest animal, man, the need for selective mating cannot have selective

disappeared. In fact, the opposite assumption, that

most

more

it

is

be true. Rut, however, supplies the animal not only with the opportunities for selection. It also definitely circumscribes and delimits sexual interest Outside the rutting season the stringent,

is

likely to

From

Instinct to Sentiment

17

in abeyance and the competition and strife overpowering absorption in sex are ehminated from the ordinary life of an animal species. Considering the great danger from outside enemies and the disruptive forces within, which are associated with courtship, the elimination of the sex interest from normal times and its concentration on a definite short period is of great importance for the survival of animal species. In the light of all this, what does the absence of rut in man really signify? The sexual impulse is not confined to any season, nor conditioned by any bodily process, and as

sexual interest

is

as well as the

far as

mere physiological forces are concerned, it is there any moment the Hfe of man and woman. It is

to affect at

ready to upset it

all

other interests at

tends constantly to

all

times; left to itself

work upon and loosen

all

existing

bonds. This impulse, absorbing and pervading as it is, would thus interfere with all normal occupations of man, would destroy any budding form of association, would create chaos from within and would invite dangers from without. As we know, this is not a mere phantasy; the sex impulse has been the source of most trouble from Adam and Eve onwards. It is the cause of most tragedies, whether we meet them in present day actualities, in past history, in myth or in Hterary production. And yet the very fact of conflict

shows that there

exist

some

forces

which control

man

does not surrender to his insatiable appetites; that he creates barriers and imposes taboos which become as powerful as the very forces of destiny. It is important to note that these barriers and mechanisms which regulate sex under culture are different from the animal safeguards in the state of nature. With the anithe sexual impulse;

it

proves that

mal instinctive endowment and physiological change throw male and female into a situation out of which they have to extricate themselves by the simple play of natural impulses. With man the control comes, as we know, from culture and tradition. In each society we find rules which make it impossible for men and women to yield freely to the impulse. How these taboos arise, by what forces they work, we shall see presently. For the moment it is enough to realize clearly

Bronislaw Malinowski

18

that a social taboo does not derive

its

force from instinct,

always has to work against some innate impulse. In this we see plainly the difference between human endowment and animal instinct. While man is ready to respond sexually at any moment, he also submits to an artificially imposed check upon this response. Again, while

but that instead

it

no natural bodily process which definitely releases between male and female, a number of inducements towards courtship guide and bring out the

there

is

active sexual interest

impulse.

We

can

now

formulate more precisely what

we mean by

the plasticity of instincts. The modes of behaviour associated with sex interest are determined in man only as re-

gards their ends; man must mate selectively, he cannot mate promiscuously. On the other hand, the release of the impulse, the inducement to courtship, the motives for a definite selection are dictated by cultural arrangements. These arrangements have to follow certain lines parallel to the lines of natural endowment in the animal. There must be an element of selection, there must be safeguards for exclusiveness, above all there must be taboos which prevent sex from constantly interfering in ordinary life. The plasticity of instincts in man is defined by the absence of physiological changes, of automatic release of a biologically determined cause of courtship. It is associated with the effective determination of sexual behaviour by cultural elements. Man is endowed with sexual tendencies but these have to be moulded in addition by systems of cultural rules which vary from one society to another. We shall be able to see with greater precision in the course of our present inquiry how far these norms can differ from each other and diverge from the fundamental animal pattern. 2.

Marital Relations

^pe of prohibition which is definitely associated with the welfare of the child is the taboo on sexual intercourse with a pregnant wife. At birth there are again duties for the father to perform. The most famous of these is the couvade, a custom in which the husband has to take over the symptoms of postnatal illness and disability while the wife goes about the ordinary business of life. But though this is the most extreme form of afl&rmation of paternity, some analogous arrangement, by which the man shares in certain postnatal burdens of his wife, or, at least, has to carry on actions in sympathy with her, exist in all societies. It is not difficult to place this t>'pe of custom in our scheme. Even the apparently absurd idea of the couvade presents to us a deep meaning and a necessar>' function. If it is of high biological value for the human family to consist of both father and mother; if traditional customs and rules are there to establish a social situation of close moral proximity between father and child; if all such customs aim at drawing the man's attention to his offspring, then the couvade which makes man simulate the birth-pangs and the illness of maternity is of great value and provides the necessary stimulus and expression for paternal tendencies. The couvade and all the customs of its t>'pe serve to accentuate the

A

principle of legitimacy, the child's need of a father.

we have again the two sides of the question. alone never determine human behaviour. Rigid instincts which would prevent man's adaptation to any In

all this

Instincts

28

Bronislaw Malinowski

new

set of conditions are useless to the

plasticity of instinctive tendencies

is

human

species.

The

the condition of cul-

But the tendencies are there and cannot be Although the character of the maternal relation is determined by culture; although the obligations are imposed from outside by tradition, they all correspond to the natural tendency, for they all emphasize the closeness of the bond between father and child, they isolate them and make them dependent upon each other. It is imtural advance.

developed

arbitrarily.

portant to note that many of these social relations are anticipatory: they prepare the father for his future feelings, they dictate to him beforehand certain responses, which he will later develop.

Paternity

we have

seen cannot be regarded as a merely

social arrangement. Social elements simply place

man

into

a situation in which he can respond emotionally, and they dictate to him a series of actions by which the paternal tendencies can find their expression. Thus, while we find that maternity is social as well as biological, we must affirm

determined also by biological elements, make-up it is closely analogous to the maternal bond. In all this culture emphasizes rather than overrides the natural tendencies. It re-makes, with other elements, the family into the same pattern as we find in nature. Culture refuses to run riot. that paternity

is

that therefore in

4.

From

its

Instinct to Sentiment

we summarized the salient points of our comparison between the constitution of the animal and the

In the last chapter

human

family.

Through

the disappearance of the definite

through the increasing cultural there arises a complexity in the human response, a variety which at first seems to introduce nothing but chaos and disorder. This, however, is not really

physiological landmarks, control in

man

the case. In the

first

place

we can

emotional adjustments of mating simplified in one direction. The

see that the varying

human human bonds

in the

family are culminate on their sexual side in marriage, on their parental side in a life-long enduring family. In both cases the emotions

From

Instinct to Sentiment

29

centre around one definite object, whether this be the consort, the child, or the parent. Thus the exclusive domi-

nance of one individual appears as the first characteristic in the growth of human emotional attitudes. As a matter of fact we can see this tendency even as we ascend in the animal kingdom from the lower to the higher species. Among the lower animals the male seed is often scattered broadcast and the fertilizing of the female egg is left entirely

to physical agencies.

The personal

equation,

and adjustment develop gradually and attain their fullest development among the highest animals. In man, however, this tendency is translated and enforced by definite institutions. Mating, for instance, is defined by a number of sociological factors some of which selection

exclude a number of females, while others indicate the suitable partners or stipulate definite unions. In certain forms of marriage the individual bond is completely established

by social elements, such as infant betrothal or socially prearranged marriages. In any case, right through courtship, matrimonial relations and the care of the children, the two individuals gradually establish an exclusive pernumber of interests of economic, sexual, legal, sonal tie. and religious nature are for each partner dominated by the

A

personality of the other.

The

legal

tion of marriage establishes, as cially enforceable

and the religious sanc-

we know,

a lifelong, so-

bond between the two. Thus

in

human

dominated by one object rather than by the situation of the moment. Within the same relationship the emotions and the type of drives and interests vary: they are usually one-sided and discon-

relations the emotional adjustments are

nected at the beginning of the courtship, they gradually ripen into a personal affection during that period, they are immensely enriched and complicated by the common life in marriage, even more so by the arrival of children. Yet throughout this variety of emotional adjustments the permanence of the object, its deep hold on the other individual's life constantly increases. The bond cannot be broken easily and the resistances are usually both psychological and social. Divorce in savage and civilized communities, for instance, or a rupture between parent and child is both a per-

30

Bronislaw Malinowski

sonal tragedy and a sociological mishap. But though the emotions which enter into the human family bond are constantly changing though they depend upon circumstances matrimonial love, for instance, entailing love and sorrow as well as joy, fear, and passionate

—

—

—

though they are always complex and never exclusively dominated by an instinct, yet they are by no means chaotic or disorganized, in fact they are arranged inclinations

into definite systems.

The

general attitude of one consort and vice versa is not

to the other, of a parent to a child

in any way accidental. Each type of relationship must dispose of a number of emotional attitudes which subserve certain sociological ends, and each attitude gradually grows up according to a definite scheme through which the emotions are organized. Thus in the relations between the two consorts the sentiment begins with the gradual awakening of sexual passion. In culture, this, as we know, is never a merely instinctive moment. Various factors, such as selfinterest, economic attraction, social advancement, modify

charm of a girl for a man or vice versa, in low levels of culture as well as in more highly developed civilizations. This interest once aroused, the passionate attitude has to be gradually built up by the traditional, customary course of courtship prevailing in a given society. No sooner has this the

attachment been built up, than the decision to enter marriage introduces a

first

contract, establishes a

sociologically defined relationship.

Through

more or this

less

period a

preparation for matrimonial ties takes place. The legal bond of marriage as a rule changes the relationship in which the sexual elements are still predominate into one of common life, and here the emotional attitudes have to become reorganized. It is important to note that the change to matrimony, which in all societies is the subject of proverbs and jokes, entails a definite and difficult readjustment of attitudes: while in the human relationship

from courtship

the sexual elements are not eliminated nor the memories of

courtship effaced, entirely new interests and new emotions have to be incorporated. The new attitudes are built upon the foundation of the old and personal tolerance and patience in trying situations have to be

formed

at the

expense

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

31

of sexual attractiveness. The initial charms and the gratitude for the erotic pleasure of earlier life have a definite psychological value and form an integral part of the later find in this an important element of human feelings.

We

sentiments: later

the carrying over of previous

stages.

We

presently

shall

memories

analyze the relation

into

of

mother to child and father to son, and show there that the same system of gradual ripening and organizing the emotions takes place. There is always a dominant emotional attitude associated with the bodily relation. Between husband and wife sexual desire is indispensable, as well as an associated bond of personal attractiveness and compatibility of character. The sentimental elements of courtship, the passionate feelings of first possession must be incorporated into the calmer affection, allowing husband and wife to enjoy each other's company throughout the best part of

These elements must also be harmonized with of work and community of interest which unite the two into the joint managers of the household. It is a well-known fact that each transition between courtship and sexual cohabitation, between that stage and the fuller common life of later matrimony, between married life and their days.

the

community

parental

life,

constitutes a crisis full of difficulties, dangers

and maladjustments. These are the points at which the tude undergoes a special phase of reorganization. .

2.

From Sex

Robert

to

Love

in

.

atti-

.

Religion

Briffault

ineluctable development of primitive magic as a means of control over supernatural forces to religion as an inter-

The

life, carried with it, Briffault says, a psychic residue of sexual rites and symbolism which was spiritualized into the exaltations of sacred love. As the erotic rit-

pretation of

32

Robert Briffault

became inconsistent with the sentiphases of culture, emphasis shifted from the sensual gesture intended to stimulate the beneficence of the gods to ascetic practices which would disarm their envy and malevolence. Out of that identification with self-defilement arose the obsessive denunciation by the Christian Fathers of sex as the essence of sin. These attitudes laid the foundation of sexual morality in Western civilization and by delineating an antithesis between spirit and flesh invested our tradition of love with its creative tensions.

uals of early religion

ments of

Robert is

best

later

Briffault,

known

for his

philosopher,

anthropologist,

novelist,

monumental study of matriarchy, The

Mothers. Reprinted from Sex in Civilization, edited by V. F. Calverton and Samuel Schmalhausen. By courtesy of Herma Briffault.

From Sex

to

Love

in

Religion

In the tradition of modern Western civilization no two spheres stand more sharply opposed than that of religion and that of sex. The manifestations of the latter are in that tradition the type of sin, the head-fount of that evil and impurity with which the religious spirit cannot be brought into touch without defilement and dissolution. Between religion and eroticism the antithesis is scarcely less than between religion and atheism. Yet a glance at the various religions of the world, outside Christianity and one or two closely allied systems, a survey of the religious rites of lower phases of culture, shows that the antithesis does not exist. Those religions and those rites are, on the contrary, shot through and through with riotous sensuality; the manifestations of the sex instinct, instead of being accounted incompatible with the religious spirit, are associated with it in the closest manner; and religion, in those phases, is almost as much concerned with sex as with ethics or theology. The religious art of New Guinea, of Polynesia, of Indonesia, of Africa, of South America is as pornographic as that of the temples of India and of Japan. In earlier

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

33

phases of culture, from that of primitive hunting tribes to the great agricultural societies out of which our own civilization has sprung, almost every ritual includes licentious dances and songs, the performance, actual or symbolic, of the sexual act, and often orgies of promiscuity. Although the erotic character of religious symbolism and ritual tends in general to become restrained in the highest phases of culture,

it

is

displayed in the fullest

manner

in

those cul-

have immediately preceded them, and is the ancient religions of the most advancei

tural stages that

conspicuous

in

and highly civilized peoples. The elaborate mystic theology of Egypt was replete with sexual symbolism; hierodular prostitution, ritual bestiality were among the observances its cult. The religions of Babylonia, of Asia Minor, of the far-flung Semitic colonies, were notorious for the licentiousness of their rites: their priestesses were sacred

of

and prostitution was incumbent upon every all peoples, except the Egyptians and the Greeks," says Herodotus, "have intercourse with women in the temples." But the exceptions which he mentions are not borne out even by his own testimony. The religion of Greece, though obscenity and Hcense were attenuated in its later phases, presented the same rites and the same features as those of Babylon and Syria; brothels were attached to the temples; phallic emblems, ritual obscenity, the conventionalized celebration of the sexual union remained to the last as features of its most sacred ceremonies. Even the austere and simple religion of Rome was associated in its most venerated native rites with ithyphalHc images of the gods, Fescennine ribaldry, and symbolic coitus.

prostitutes

woman. "Nearly

The early Christian Fathers never wearied of inveighing against "the beastly devices of the heathen," and one of their favorite arguments was that all heathen religions were is, associated with licentiousness and sexual stimulation, and that the supreme merit of Christianity was to have, for the first time, introduced chastity and decency into religious worship. "You are utter unbelievers," said

impure, that

Clement of Alexandria addressing the pagan populations of the Roman empire, "in order that you may indulge your passions. You believe in your idols because you crave after

34

Robert Briffault

No charge brought against paganism was more difficult to rebut. When confronted with the pronounced sexual character of religions throughout most phases of their development, the traditional mind must needs subscribe to the view of the Christian Fathers, and set down the phenomenon to some vicious corruption which has seemingly overtaken in most instances the manifestatheir licentiousness."

tions of the religious spirit.

Such an explanation will not, however, bear consideracan no longer be regarded as isolated in its development from the various rehgions in the midst of which it arose. That development is now recognized to have been continuous, through a long line of religious evolution, with the rites and conceptions of the most uncultured peoples. The sexual character of religious ritual and symbolism, on the other hand, far from exhibiting the attributes of an incidental and adventitious corruption attendant upon luxury and civilization, is an essential and central feature of religious phenomena in their most primitive and rudimentary form. The explanation is not supplied by any theory of adventitious corruption, but by the understanding of the evolutionary process that has given rise to religions. While the highest term of that process is continuous with the most rudimentary, the intended function which religion fulfils has in the course of that development undergone important changes. Without attempting the notoriously invidious task of a definition, the connotation which the term religion calls forth in the modern mind is that of an interpretion. Christianity

tation of existence. Religion, in other words, is primarily thought of as a system of metaphysics. But that conception of the function of religion is not applicable to it in earlier phases. Nothing is more foreign to the psychology of primitive humanity than a desire to answer philosophical questions and to interpret the universe of existence. Such questions do not interest savages and are not understood by them. What to us is the most obvious feature of religion has no place in its more primitive forms. The its

function of primitive religion is much crete, and practical. It is not to interpret

more life,

direct, conbut to obtain

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

35

those things which are accounted needful for its sustenance. This it attempts to do by the aid of supernatural means employed as adjuvants to practical measures and personal effort. The character of primitive religion does not correspond to the common connotation which the term has

—

much as to that suggested by the term magic a term that has indeed reference etymologically to the functions of priests among the ancient Aryan peoples. The primary needs and desires of primitive humanity, acquired so

and therefore the primary

objects of its magico-religious are to secure the increase and multiplication of the sources of food, animal and vegetable, and of the tribe. The most common form of ritual procedure employed to prorites,

mote those aims

is

that described as imitative magic.

Hunters endeavor to stimulate the multiplication of game animals by dressing up as those animals, male and female,

and imitating the act of procreation. Thus in the buffalodance of the Siouan tribes, the men dressed as buffaloes represented the covering of buffalo cows by the bull, and the phallic appendage with which the latter was provided was, at the end of the ceremony, exhibited to the people by the officiating priestess, who said "she held the power of creation and also the power of life and death over them." In other instances promiscuous intercourse took place, the men exchanging wives. There are many indications that very similar rites were common among the hunting populations of Europe, and the procedure appears to be illustrated in cave-pictures of the Magdalenian Age. The growth of crops is universally promoted by similar ritual means. The behef is found to be general over five continents that the planting of seed, to be effective, must be accompanied by the performance of the sexual act. The ritual coitus is

sometimes, as

among

the Pipeles of Salvador

and the Musquaki Indians, carefully timed so

as to coin-

m

the ground. Peasants cide with the deposition of the seed in Holland and in Germany at the present day avail them-

same measures, and make a point of having intercourse with their wives in the fields after the latter have been sown. The fable of Demeter and lasion, who are described as adopting the same means to secure the fertility selves of the

36

Robert Briffault

of the fields in Crete,

shows that the notion was an old

es-

tablished one in the Hellenic world. Agricultural festivals, and more especially those connected with the planting of

seed and the gathering of the harvest, present in every region of the world and in every age the most conspicuous examples of general sexual license. Thus among all the Bantu races of Africa the agricultural festivals "are akin in character to the feasts of Bacchus. It is impossible to witness

them without being ashamed. Men and women, who in ordinary circumstances are modest in behavior and speech, abandon themselves to licentiousness. Prostitution is freely indulged in, and adultery is not viewed with any sense of heinousness on account of the surroundings." In India "the is the signal for general license, and such looked upon as a matter of absolute necessity. Men set aside all conventions and women all modesty, and complete liberty is given to the girls." That license has a definite ritual purpose, and is sometimes, as among the Dayaks of North Borneo, limited to a short period of time, after which order must be restored. The agricultural populations of Algeria resent any restriction being placed upon the licentiousness of their women upon the ground that any attempt to enforce sexual morality would be prejudicial to the success of their agricultural operations. The Athenian thesmophoria, or sowing-feasts, preserved in attenuated form the original character of the magic of fertility.

harvest festival license

is

The women carried phallic emblems and uttered obscenities. The saturnalia were the Roman feasts of sowing, and have been succeeded by the carnival of southern Europe, in which phallic symbols, differing little from those in vogue among the Sioux and in Dahomey, were down to recent years a conspicuous feature. The primitive ithyphallic deities of Rome were for the most part the agricultural fetishes of the peasant population, who regarded the images of Mutunus or of Fascinus, assimilated later to the Hellespontine

wood, as essenAt Lavinium the ithyphallic god Liber was drawn in a chariot round the land, and his enormous member was crowned with flowers god Priapus, roughly carved out of tial

fig-tree

to securing the fertility of the fields.

by the matrons.

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

37

Agriculture was regarded as entirely a question of religion. Nothing so astonished the Pueblo Indians when the Spanish padres settled amongst them than to see them grow crops without employing any religious or magical means of securing success. When the direct objects which it is intended to secure by primitive ritual, and the means employed to do so, are considered, the close original association of religion and sexual activity is manifest. But the association is even more intimate and fundamental. The increase of the human population is accounted no less important than that of the means of subsistence. The process of generation, which remains in many respects obscure to the modem biologist, is generally regarded by uncultured people as more supernatural than physiological in character. Some tribes of Australia and of New Guinea are said to be unaware of the relation between the congress of the sexes and conception. Apart from such extreme instances, the physiological act is scarcely ever regarded as constituting the sole efficient cause of generation. From the lowest to the most advanced stages of culture, the male is thought to be Uttle more than the vehicle through which supernatural powers operate. It is the general belief of men in the lower cultures that during sexual excitement, as in the state of inspiration or divine possession, they are for the time being the medium and abode of a god. The view of the Tartars that "each human being is brought into existence by special divine interference" may be said to express the general belief in the matter. It is indeed substantially the view of St. Paul:^ "That seed which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be but God giveth it a body." The Catholic Church teaches that the soul of a human being "is created and united by God to the infant body .

.

.

which union is called passive conception." The Christian Fathers were indeed much perplexed over the question hqw illegitimate children can be bom at all, since

yet unborn,

they are in reality created by God, and

He condemns

forni-

The

idea that the sperm constitutes the actual substance of the Deity, who uses the human male as his mecation.

dium during the condition of sexual excitement, has 1/ Corinthians, xv, 37-38.

sur-

Robert Briffault

38

vived in mystic theological thought down to the present day, and ecclesiastics have expressed the opinion that chastity serves to conserve the divine essence within man. The Manichaeans and other Gnostic sects are said to have been in the habit of administering human sperm to communicants, mingled with the elements of the Eucharistic sacrifice. The ancient Hebrews were wont to administer the most solemn oaths by placing the hand of the testator on their testicles,'* and the very words testify, testament, etc., from testis, a testicle, bear witness to the diffusion of the same ideas. The act of procreation is thus regarded as the occasion when the actual divine presence is most clearly manifested,

and ans,

as the divine act par excellence.

when they have

Orthodox Muhammed-

intercourse with their wives, recite a

short prayer, thus acknowledging the sacred character of

the act. It can therefore cause little surprise that the act of copulation was, in the Mysteries which constituted the

pagan analogue of the Christian Eucharist, associated with the partaking of the sacred substances designed to effect

communion of the faithful with the divinity. The views of most pious persons among ourselves

the closer

do not

thus

from those held by the Australian aborigines; they would account the opinion blasphemous that procreation is an exclusively physiological process, and they are at one with all savage peoples in holding that children are sent by God. Conception is commonly believed to be brought about by countless agencies other than sexual differ essentially

intercourse.

The notion

is

almost universal that other con-

must be complied with before conception can follow. Thus in many parts of Australia, as also among the Eskimo and the Plains Indians, it is thought essential that a woman should be supplied with suitable animal food by a ditions

man

before he can cause her to become pregnant. Among women do not think they could bear children unless they had previously stood naked under a drenching thunder-shower. Many of the observances and rituals which form part of marriage ceremonies are intended to fulfill preliminary conditions which are accounted necesthe Hottentots the

2 Genesis, xxiv, 2-3, xlvii, 29, translated thigh.

where the word

for penis

is

euphemistically

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

39

sary before pregnancy can take place. In all those beliefs and observances the idea is that human generation is directly dependent upon the operation of

some supernatural power. The sexual rites of early

.

.

.

religion are not confined to

promoting the fertility of food-animals, of the fruits of the earth, and of women. Those primary purposes of primitive magic, frequently combined in rites of fertility, also include the ritual control of the rainfall, that paramount requirement of early cultures. Rain, upon which the ferof the soil depends,

tility

is

generally assimilated to seminal

and the Manichaeans are said to have regarded a downpour of rain as the effect of amatory excitement on the part of the deity. In the same manner Priapus was, among the Romans, the sender of rain. In India the amount of rain is thought to be proportionate to the number of marriages that have taken place during the season. What is regarded as the chief factor upon which depends that geneVal prosperity which it is the primary object of archaic re-

fluid,

ligion to secure, thus presents itself to primitive theology as appertaining no less than the control of the powers of generation to the sexual aspect of religion. The utilitarian effects of sexual activity extend, in early ritual, to practices intended to promote the general welfare of the community and to avert danger and misfortune. Thus when the black-fellows of Australia were panicstricken by a storm or an aurora australis they indulged in general sexual promiscuity, thinking thereby to placate the powers which were thought to threaten their well-being. Ritual prostitution was resorted to by the Amerind tribes as a remedy against every manner of evil^ as in cases of epidemics or on the occasion of the illness of a chief. Similarly the Patagonians when dogged by misfortune send their wives into the forest with a request that they shall yield themselves to the first stranger who presents himself. The ancient Greeks were familiar with the same ideas. When the Lokrians of Magna Grecia were hard pressed by their warlike neighbors, they proposed to avert military disaster by placing their wives for a month in the brothels of

the

city.

The courtesans of Corinth were rewarded by

a

40

Robert Briffault

public memorial for their patriotic conduct in the exercise of their calling when the city was threatened by the Persian invasion.

A

usage which doubtless dates from the times

of the Pharaohs is still carried out in lower Egypt by women of the most respectable families. When they are keenly desirous of obtaining some special grace from heaven, they a solemn vow to attend the holy mulid of Ahmedal-Bedawi, the most popular religious festival of the country, and there to yield their favors to the first man who

make

happens

approach them. observances which are by some peoples re-garded as incumbent upon every woman in the interests of the community, are by others delegated to specially appointed sacred women, priestesses and hierodules, who are regarded as the wives of the god, and fulfill their office either by acting as prostitutes in the temple precincts, or by effecting the divine union with consecrated priests of the god. The sacred marriage is often celebrated, either in actual or symbolic ritual, by the chief priestess or the queen and the supreme hierophant or other representative of the god. That sacred marriage, or hieros gamos, constitutes the central and most solemn act of many religious ceremonials, as in the sun-dance of the Arapahos, in the Vedic rites of ancient India, of Egypt, of Babylon, of Crete, of Athens, and in the Mysteries of Eleusis. The divine generative and creative power is not only thought to be assisted in its activity and diffused throughout nature and mankind by the sexual act, but that power is held to be stimulated by any means calculated to produce erotic excitation. Hence every form of lasciviousness and obscenity of word or deed promotes the aims of religious magic. As the Kochs of Bengal explain, the god "is pleased to see nude women dancing before him and to hear obscene songs, in consideration of which he sends rain and a good harvest." For such reasons, as Porphyry remarks, "phalli are set up to the gods and obscene phrases used." Nudity is universally held to assist the success of all magi-

The

to

ritual

cal operations. It

at

is

a requisite of the practice of witch-

which was but the survival of pagan rituals, and is the present day a feature of the rain-making ceremonies

Craft,

From Sex which

still

among

survive

the

to

Love

in Religion

41

more secluded populations

Europe. The obscenities characteristically attributed Sabbaths of witches were not manifestations of corrupt licentiousness, but of magical efficiency. By such ribaldry and exhibitionism was Baubo, in Attic tradition, reputed to have conciliated the deity of fertihty, and the gesture of Baubo was part of the ritual of Egyptian women at the agricultural festival of Bubastis and at the installation of the sacred Apis bull, the offspring and representative of of

to the

moon. Such obscenity

the

is

a feature of the rites of re-

women from which men

are strictly excluded, in Africa and in Indonesia, no less than of the women's rites of ancient Mediterranean cults. In the same manner as, being regarded as an obligatory and sacred ritual, it imphed no reflection upon the character of the maligious societies of

Rome,

so the boundless obscenity of in Central Africa is, we are assured, consistent with the utmost modesty in their habit-

trons of Athens and the rites performed

by

women

ual conduct.

With the extension of the proprietary sentunents and claims which goes with the conditions of advanced civilization, the tendency is everywhere to restrict sexual religious practices which are opposed to those sentiments. In Greece the grov/th of those sentiments "gradually swept out of recovered with a decent veil, that great mass of rites which was concerned with the food supply and the tribe-supply and aimed at direct stimulation of the generligion, or at least

ative processes. It left only a

few reverent and mystic

ritu-

a few licensed outbursts of riotous indecency in comedy, and the agricultural festivals." ^ Athenian tradition als,

stated

women

that

and

Solon had

"regulated

the

their festivals, forbidding

outgoings

by law

all

of

the

disorder

and excess." * In the phallephoria, the consecrated emblems were replaced by poles adorned with ribbons, and the obscenity of the songs was regulated by official censorship. The Fescennine jests which are loudly chanted by the women in the rituals of Africa and of the East Indies were whispered by the officiating women in the Athenian thesmo3

*

Gilbert Murray. Plutarch, Vit. Sol. xxi.

42

Robert Briffault

Roman cult of Bona Dea. The phalli which were carried in procession in Egypt and in Dahomey and set in motion by operating strings were covered with a cloth in the Attic ritual and hidden in the temple of Vesta at Rome. In Syria women were in later times permitted to compound for the obligation of pre-nuptial prostitution by cutting off their hair, a common marriage rite by which, like Catholic nuns, they became mystically united to the phoria and in the

Divine Bridegroom. Primitive magico-religious ritual consists broadly of two orders of procedures, the one intended to please, attract,

and conciliate the divine powers, the other to avert and harm which they have power to inflict. To the first class belong imitative magic and all those rites which are designed to increase and stimulate the beneficent functions of the gods; to the second belong the rites of aversion and of mourning. As the sexual rites and symexorcise the

bolisms of early religion became inconsistent with the sentiments of more advanced cultural phases, the alternative class of primitive magical measures acquired a corresponding importance, namely, those practices which originally served to avert the envy and jealousy of ghosts and other supernatural beings. These practices consist everywhere in abstention from all forms of gratification which might arouse envious feelings, in self-humiliation, in the mortification of the body, in neglect of personal adornment and cleanliness, in the self-infliction of injuries fasting,

and above

and mutilations,

The two

classes of primitive ritual are very clearly illustrated in Greek religion. The Greeks designated by the same term, agneia, the term which is used by the Christian Fathers to denote chastity and sexual purity, both abstinence, not only from in

all

in

chastity.

sexual intercourse, but also from food, and also the rites of mourning, or rites of aversion. Porphyry "going to the

heart of ancient religion," as Miss Harrison remarks, us that those rites were practiced "not in order that we

tells

may

induce the presence of the gods, but that these wretched things may keep off." Such funereal or ascetic rites are generally regarded, as for instance in India, as imparting, like all magic procedures, a power of control over supernatural

From Sex

to

Love

in Religion

43

agencies which owes nothing to any moral character attaching to them or to the person who carries them out, who may be a malefactor or a daemon. They are supposed to control the gods, not by pleasing them, as sexual rites are

supposed to do, but by disarming their envy and malevoand belong therefore essentially to the element of

lence,

fear in religion.

Among

the Jews,

who drew no

distinction

requirements and ethical virtues, the identification of magic practices and moral quaUties proceeded to a degree which was singular among the nations of antiquity. The conception of ritual defilement, of lack of agneia, became modified with them into that of moral im-

between

ritual

Out of that identification arose the which characterized early Christianity, and

purity or sin. ideals

ascetic in par-

ticular the fierce denunciation of all manifestations of the

sexual instinct as the essence of evil. The uncompromising attitude of the Christian Fathers, which caused many Christian converts to castrate themselves, condemned marriage

with religion, pronounced woman to be and declared the extinction of the human race to be preferable to its propagation through sexual intercourse, has afforded the foundation of those standards of sexual morality which have ever since been current in as

inconsistent

the gate of hell,

the tradition of Western civilization. It is customary to regard those standards as the mature fruit of accumulated human experience, as the temperate conclusions of human wisdom. But it is not so. They are the survival of what, in their original form,

few would hesitate to pronounce

as

being the fanatical ravings of delirious minds. The manifestations of the sex instinct are almost as syn-

development as religion. Because it most potent actuating impulse of living beings, the

cretic in their cultural is

the

reproductive instinct infuses its imperious force into every other form of activity in proportion to the extent of the repression imposed upon its direct operation. In the lowest phases of culture the appeal of sex is, as among animals, almost entirely functional and physical. With the restrictions introduced during the course of social development, forms of sublimation are imposed upon the activity of the instinct

which are

to a large extent

molded by

the environ-

44

Robert Briffault

ing traditional culture.

Man

owes

his exceptional social in-

circumstance that, in a degree without parallel among animals, he develops under the protecting care of maternal love operating over a long period of helpless in-

stincts to the

fancy. That condition of dependence is the most specific character of the psychical constitution of man. The need to which it gives rise is supplied in primitive cultures by the strong social solidarity between members of the same clan or tribal group. Where that original tribal organiza-

and its remarkable solidarity have disappeared, the need of the dependent human individual is supplied by personal affections and friendships. In monogamic societies that need becomes naturally conjomed with the organic

tion

The wife or mistress is not only, as with the savage, an object of sexual desire, she is also the surrogate of the mother. The needs of the sex instinct thus beinstincts of sex.

come intimately blended with the most pronounced specific character of humanity resulting from man's prolonged infancy and dependent development "the love of Love and

—

°

the heart's loneliness." The sentunental development of sexual love acquires likewise a greatly increased importance with reference to religion as this passes

from the stage of primitive magic

to

more philosophic and emotional phases of its development. When rehgion comes to be viewed not as a magic means of satisfying the needs of Ufe by the control of super-

the

natural sources of power, but as an interpretation of the universe and of man's relation to it, the chief emotional aspect of that relation becomes identical with the quality

of man's disposition which has sublimated sexual love. The need for a trust or faith in the existence of a well-disposed and beneficent power governing human destiny, which has sometimes been improperly described as a religious instinct, is of the same nature as the need of the dependent human individual for the equivalent of maternal tenderness in his sexual associate. Schleiermacher, in the discourses which for a long time set the standard of the theme, placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence, without attempting to define the object towards which it 6

Rupert Brooke.

From Sex was

directed.

to

Love

That feeling of dependence

in Religion is

45

the source of

the sentiment of love, as it is of all human social instincts. of the Deity has thus been commonly characterized by the declaration that "God is love," and the re-

The function

supreme power to man has come to be remainly parental. The most exalted forms of religious emotion are represented by that "love of God," in which God is faint and love is fierce. The emotionalism of the saint and the ascetic is a manifestation of the same psychic elements which, in other circumstances, will fire the romantic exaltation of the lover. As with the latter, the spiritualized sentiment is insepalation of the

garded

rable

as

from

its

psycho-physiological basis:

when

the religious

emotions surge up, the sexual emotion is never far away. Hence the fierceness of Christian sexophpbia. The obsessive denunciation of sex which fills Patristic literature is the protest of an exasperated sensuality envious of that which it

denies

itself

homage which Jerome, "when

and for which

it

secretly craves. It

virtue pays to vice. I

was

"How

living in the desert

is

the

often," says St.

which

affords to

hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by a burning sun, did I fancy myself amid the pleasures of Rome! I sought solitude because I was filled with bitterness. ... I, who from the fear of hell had consigned myself to that prison where scorpions and wild beasts were my companions, fancied myself among bevies of young girls. My face was pale and my frame chilled from fasting, yet my mind was burning with the cravings of desire, and the fires of lust flared up from my flesh that was as that of a corpse. I do not

blush to avow my abject misery." The primal function of the primitive religious magic of generation is re-echoed throughout the long line of female votaries of the Divine Bridegroom, in the lascivious ecstasies of a St. Theresa, of a St. Catherine, of a Madame Guvon. In 1925, a Norman Carmelite nun, Therese Martin, was added to the list of Catholic Saints under the title of St. Theresa of Jesus, on account of her transcendent devotion to her spiritual spouse.

"Ah! how sweet

is

the

first kiss

of Jesus!" she exclaims in the collection of devotional thought she has contributed. "Indeed it is a kiss of love. I

46

Robert Briffault

myself beloved by him, and I said to him 'I love you, I give myself to you for ever.' Jesus and myself have for a long time understood each other. Our coming together was My heaven is no other than that a fusion of our being. of Love, I have felt that nothing could detach my ardour from the divine being who has ravished me." The male aspect of the deity is, as an obvious consequence of the conceptions which have been noted, predomfelt

,

.

.

primitive societies of hunters, nomads and But the male god is, as a rule, associated even among these with a female deity, who is not his wife, but his mother. For descent being primitively reckoned through the women, a motherless male presents to the mind of the savage an incongruity. With the development of agriculture as

inant

among

pastoralists.

the chief

means of

subsistence, the

Mother of God, while

remaining invariably a lunar goddess, acquires an enhanced importance from her assimilation to the fruit-bearing earth. In her religion, which attained conspicuous prominence throughout Mediterranean civilizations, the religious emotion of the men was afforded the same opportunity of close approxunation to the sexual emotion as that of the women in the cult of the Divine Bridegroom and Dying God. The goddesses of fertility, the Divine Mothers, Ishtar, Ashtharte, Anaitis, Hathor, Aphrodite, are likewise the Goddesses of Love. Christian theology at first excluded the Mother Goddess from its scheme, substituting the Holy Ghost, whose name, feminine in Hebrew, is neuter in Greek, for Holy Sophia, although Judaic Gnosticism continued to regard the third person of the Trinity as the mother of Christ. The Goddess was, however, before long restored to her time-honored place in the devotion of the peoples of Mediterranean lands, and the Queen of Heaven resumed her pristine position with her ancient attributes, the crescent moon and the serpent. The erotic hymns and sonnets to the Holy Virgin which abound in medieval literature, the exaltations of her worshipers, of which a vivid analysis has been given by Zola in La Faute de I' Abbe Mouret, present the counterpart of the fires and languors of feminine devotion. The psychiatrist and the alienist are well aware that re-

Courtly Love

47

ligious exaltation, like sexual sentiment, readily reverts in its

ity

manifestations to the more direct forms of sexual activand to the crudest perversions and aberrations to which

that activity lation

is

subject under the stress of excessive stimu-

and repression.

3.

C.

Courtly Love

Lewis

S.

the end of the eleventh century there appeared quite suddenly in the south of France a new, a very different kind of love, and lyrical poetry which both celebrated and gave it form. It is diflBcult for us to imagine a world devoid of the motives and ideals generated by the pursuit of romantic love. Yet "love" in its modern sense begins with a state of mind known to us through the literature in which it was and a Religion of Love in which woman, seen expressed in patristic misogyny as the gateway to Hell, becomes an

At

—

—

object of the noblest devotion.

Did the troubadours first become conscious of a newemotion and then invent a new kind of poetry to express it? Or did the hterary convention teach those who practiced it a new feeling? This "fatal dichotomy" cannot be bridged; but the poetry of courtly love signaled, C. S. Lewis writes, "a change which has left no comer of our ethics, our imagination, our daily life untouched.

revolution the Renaissance

is

a

.

.

mere

Compared with

.

ripple

this

on the surface

of literature." Since the origins of our romantic tradition lie in poetry, they lend themselves admirably to the approach of this distinguished literary scholar, who views the allegory of love as a bridge

from myth

to consciousness.

Reprinted from The Allegory of Love by C. permission of The Clarendon Press, Oxford.

S.

Lewis.

By

Courtly Love

The

Middle Ages is apt to form and by its matter. of a struggle between personified

allegorical love poetry of the

repel the

modern reader both by

The form, which

is

that

its

abstractions, can hardly be expected to appeal to an age which holds that "art means what it says" or even that art

—

for it is essential to this form that the literal is meaningless narrative and the significacio should be separable. As for the matter, what have we to do with these medieval lovers

—

"servants" or "prisoners" they called themselves

seem

to be always

weeping and always on

—who

their knees before

The popular erotic literature of our own day tends rather to sheikhs and "Salvage Men" and marriage by capture, while that which is in favour with our intellectuals recommends either frank animalism or the free companionship of the sexes. In every way, if we have not outgrown, we have at least grown away from, the Romance of the Rose. The study of this whole tradition may seem, at first sight, to be but one more example of that itch for "revival," that refusal to leave any corpse ungalvanized, which is among the more distressing accidents of scholarship. But such a view would be superficial. Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. Neither the form nor the sentiment of this old poetry has passed away without leaving indelible traces on our minds. We shall understand our present, and perhaps even our future, the better if we can succeed, by an eff'ort ladies of inflexible cruelty?

of the historical imagination, in reconstructing that longlost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression. But we shall not be able to do so unless we begin by carrying our attention back to a chapperiod long before that poetry was born. In this ter, I shall trace in turn the rise both of the sentiment .

called "Courtly

.

.

Love" and of the allegorical method. The no doubt, to carry us far from our

discussion will seem,

Courtly Love

49

main subject: but it cannot be avoided. Every one has heard of courtly love, and every one knows that it appears quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in Languedoc. The characteristics of the Troubadour poetry have been repeatedly described/ With the form, which is lyrical, and the style, which is sophisticated and often "aureate" or deliberately enigmatic, we

need not concern ourselves. The sentiment, of course, love, but love of a highly specialized sort,

is

whose charac-

may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Aduland the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady's lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence m her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. There is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady's "man." He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not "my lady" but "m.y lord." ^ The whole attitude has been rightly described as "a feudalisation of love." ^ This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life. It is teristics

tery,

who are, in the old sense of the word, becomes, from one point of view the flower, from another the seed, of all those noble usages which distinguish the gentle from the vilein: only the courteous can love, but it is love that makes them courteous. Yet this love, though neither playful nor licentious in its expression, is always what the nineteenth century called "dishonourable" love. The poet normally addresses another man's wife, and the situation is so carelessly accepted that he seldom concerns himself much with her husband: his real enemy is the rival.* But if he is ethically careless, he is no light-hearted gallant: his love is represented as a despairing and tragical emotion or almost despairing, for he is saved from complete wanhope by his faith in the God of Love who never betrays his faithful worshippers and who can subjugate the possible only to those polite. It thus

—

See Fauriel. Histoire de la Poesie provenQale, 1846; E. Gorra, Origini della Poesia Amorosa di Provenza (Rendiconti del Istituto Lombardo, 14, xlv. 3), 1910-12; Jeanroy. La Poesie lyrique des TroubaII. xliii. dours, 1934. 2 Jeanroy, op. cit., torn, i, p. 91 n. ,-, , sWechssler, Das Kulturproblem des Minnesangs, 1909, Bnd. I, p. 177. * Jeanroy, op. cit., torn, ii, pp. 109-13. 1

etc &c.

50

C.

S.

Lewis

cruellest beauties.^

The

characteristics of this sentiment,

and

its

systematic

coherence throughout the love poetry of the Troubadours as a whole, are so striking that they easily lead to a fatal misunderstanding. We are tempted to treat "courtly love" as a mere episode in literary history an episode that we have finished with as we have finished with the peculiarities of Skaldic verse or Euphuistic prose. In fact, however, an unmistakable continuity connects the Provengal love song with the love poetry of the later Middle Ages, and thence, through Petrarch and many others, with that of the present day. If the thing at first escapes our notice, this is because we are so familiar with the erotic tradition of modern Europe that we mistake it for some-

—

thing natural and universal and therefore do not inquire into its origins. It seems to us natural that love should

be the commonest theme of serious imaginative literature: but a glance at classical antiquity or at the Dark Ages at once shows us that what we took for "nature" is really a special state of affairs, which will probably have an end, and which certainly had a beginning in eleventh-century or it seemed to us till lately a natural Provence. It seems thing that love (under certain conditions) should be regarded as a noble and ennobling passion: it is only if we imagine ourselves trying to explain this doctrine to Aristotle, Virgil, St. Paul, or the author of Beowulf, that we become aware how far from natural it is. Even our code of etiquette, with its rule that women always have precedence, is a legacy from courtly love, and is felt to be far from natural in modern Japan or India. Many of the features of this sentiment, as it was known to the Troubadours, have indeed disappeared; but this must not blind us to the fact that the most momentoiJS and the most revolutionary elements in -it have made the background of European literature for

—

—

hundred years. French poets, in the eleventh century, discovered or invented, or were the first to express, that romantic species of passion which English poets were still writing about in the nineteenth. They effected a change which has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or eight

BIbid., p. 97.

— Courtly Love

51

our daily life untouched, and they erected impassable barriers between us and the classical past or the Oriental present. Compared with this revolution the Renaissance is a

mere ripple on the surface of literature. There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming to wipe out of our minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food both of modern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of "happiness" a happiness grounded on successful romantic love which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction. In ancient literature love seldom rises above the levels of merry sensuality or domestic comfort, except to be treated as a tragic madness, an olttj, which plunges otherwise sane people (usually women) into crime and disgrace. Such is the love of Medea, of Phaedra, of Dido; and such the love from which maidens pray that the gods may protect them.^ At the other end of the scale we find the comfort and utility of a good wife acknowledged: Odysseus loves Penelope as he loves the rest of his home and possessions, and Aristotle rather grudgingly admits that the conjugal relation may now and then rise to the same level as the virtuous friendship between good men.'' But this has plainly very little to do with "love" in the modern or medieval sense; and if we turn to ancient love poetry proper, we shall be even more disappointed. We shall find the poets loud in their praises

—

—

of love, Ti

taches himself with pleasure to a succession of love objects in response to the satisfactions they offer and afford him.

His mother, his father, later his brothers and sisters, still later his playmates and teachers, and finally his adult companions,

become successive

foci of the direction of his love.

Conflicts and rivalries develop. Certain patterns of solution

are arrived ally,

at,

based on his earliest experiences, which usu-

of course, involve his mother and father.

All this

is

well

known and

I

refer to

it

.

.

.

again here only to

my

statement that there does exist a scientific few have it or make use of it. People go about in pursuance of their troubled love affairs in as bland an ignorance as that of the West Indian natives infected with malaria and yaws before the introduction of scientific medicine. The idea of going to a scientist for adsubstantiate

knowledge of

love, although

2 In the Middle Ages this was not true. Many readers are probably familiar with the pictures of Ter Borch, Van Ostade, Dou, and others among the Dutch and Flemish painters especially, in which a long-robed physician is peering solemnly at a flask of urine to determine %vhether or not a woman patient is in love, or is pregnant. One of the more famous of these pictures is labeled Das Liebenkrank.

Love

against

Hate

225

would still never occur to the vast majority of American citizens. The "libido theory" has been a part of the body of scientific knowledge for nearly fifty years. It was first introduced to science in Freud's celebrated Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex. It is elaborated in many volumes of psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature. In its original form this libido theory traced the natural history of the evolution of the erotic instinct as observed and interpreted before the aggressive instinct was recognized. Numerous phenomena convinced Freud that a monistic interpretation of human motivation is insufficient to explain the observed facts. Consequently, the libido theory was supplemented by a "thanatos theory," just as in physical science it was discovered that the electron theory in its original form required the postulation of neutrons and protons to supplement it. Even now, in some psychiatric literature, authors continue to speak as if the antiquated libido theory had never been modified by Freud or anyone else.^ Thus the scientific theory of love has become the theory of the interaction and fusion of the erotic and destructive instincts ... It is necessary for the ego to make compromises between what our instincts demand and what our intelligence and sense of social reality permit us. Primitive man could kill what he liked and could gratify his love invice about love problems

3 Take, for example, the condition known as paranoia. This is a defiabnormal psychological state in which an individual feels that others are persecuting him. According to the old libido theory, this was explained by a very ingenious shuffling of the cards to the effect that the person who felt himself persecuted was actually attracted homosexually to the alleged persecutor and was defending himself against this by a delusion that effectually made such a seduction impossible. The layman reading these words may not realize how profound this interpretation was in influencing the thinking of medical science; it has been accepted by psychiatrists pretty generally all over the world, in spite of obvious logical fallacies. These fallacies were rectified, however, by the subsequent recognition of the destructive tendencies and the impulses of hate. The man who feels himself persecuted is obviously defending himself not c.gainst his love of someone so much as against his hate for someone, someone whom the {persecutor represents. He defends himself by saying, "It is not I who hate him, but he who hates me." That this is mingled with homosexual attraction is undoubtedly true, but that it is primarily determined by erotic attraction is a misrepresentation of the very nature of love. The original interpretation of paranoid symptoms occurs in Freud's "Psychoanalytic Notes Upon an Account of Paranoia" (Collected Papers, 3:390-470, London, Hogarth Press, 1925, originally published in 1911). For a revision of the theory in the light of Freud's subsequent changes in the instinct theory, see R. P. Knight, "The Relationship of Latent Homosexuality to the Mechanism of Paranoid Delusions" {Bull. Menninger Clinic, 4:149-159, 1940).

nitely

Karl Menninger

226 stinct

man

without reference to any can do neither.

restrictions.

Contemporary

idea of fusion that must be emphasized. Love capable of modifying the hate impulses and bringing them within the range of social acceptability and usefulness. But, on the other hand, the love instinct itself has to be modified and altered. "All the instinctual impulses that we can study are made up of such fusions or alloys of the two kinds of instincts. Naturally, they are to be found mixed in the greatest variety of proportions." * There is, therefore, no such thing as pure love (or pure hate). The expression of the life instinct, then, is to be seen in love, and love in three forms. First of all, it is absorbed in the partial or complete neutralization of the destruction instinct in other words, in the accomplishment of sublimation. Secondly, it is expressed in diffuse extensions of love to nonsexual objects, or to objects that are not sexual in the ordinary sense of the word. I refer here to the love we have for nature, inanimate objects, pets, social friends, and society at large. The energy for such attachments comes from the erotic instinct, but the object selected and the feelings experienced for it are not consciously recognized as perIt is this

...

is

—

is expended directly which must be called "sexual" in any meaning

taining to sexuality. Finally, the love

upon

objects

of the word.

We

.

.

.

devote

chapter to a consideration of the and the possible means of encouraging these. To begin with the more attenuated expressions of love, we might speak first of those investments which become deflected from human beings to inanimate objects. One frequently sees a concentration of affection upon automobiles, watches, garments, books, and many of the other tools of living. These objects become almost a part of the self but are praised, adored, and tenderly cared for with a highly sentimentalized affection. It might be assumed that such affection is entirely denatured of any conscious sexual element, but sometimes this is obviously not the case. Of Napoleon's cannoneers, who dragged their dismembered shall

this

direct expressions of love

*

Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures

1933, p. 144.

in Psychoanalysis,

Norton,

Love

against

Hate

227

guns over the Alps, Abbott wrote: It was now the great glory of these men to take care of their guns. They loved tenderly the merciless monsters. They lavished caresses and terms of endearment

upon

the glittering, polished, death-dealing brass.

heart of

graded

man

is

a strange enigma.

The

Even when most

de-

needs something to love. These blood-stained soldiers, brutalized by vice, amid all the horrors of battle, lovingly fondled the murderous machines of war. The unrelenting gun was the stern cannoneer's lady-love. He kissed it with unwashed, mustached lips. Affectionately he named it Mary, Emma, Lizzie. it

.

.

.

.

.

.

only a step from the love of inanimate objects to the nonhuman objects, such as flowers, trees, birds, and especially domesticated animals and pets.^ The personification of inanimate and nonhuman objects and the bestowal of love upon them is a familiar phenomenon of childhood; dolls, rabbits, dogs, toys of all kinds take on human qualities and are beloved, sometimes even beyond It is

love of animate but

any

human

beings.

.

.

.

The

extent to which these attachments to nonhuman love objects continue in adult life ® with a repression of the personification would probably amaze anyone who has never

—

been introspective about it the loving treatment accorded his flowers by the gardener, the affection for "mother earth" 5 The affection of many people for animal pets and the faculty that some people have of dealing with them successfully is common knowledge. Prehow the interchange of feeling takes place is not very well understood. Certainly love can be expressed by gentleness and in other subtle ways which defy description but which permit it to be perceived and reacted to even by wild animals. This has been reported in some scientific articles as well as in many legends such as that of Androcles and the Lion and such novels as White's Andivius Hedulio. I know of nothing more impressive, however, than the work of Grace Wiley of Minnesota and California who, originally terrified by all kinds of snakes, so completely overcame this fear and so skillfully mastered the technique of gentleness that she feeds and handles hundreds of the most dangerously poisonous and notoriously unpredictable snakes, including mambas and cobras. (Grace O. Wiley, "Taming King Cobras," Natural History Magazine, 39:

cisely

60-63, January 1937, and "With Fangs Withheld," Nature Magazine, 34: 429-432, October 1941.) ^ In our culture, especially. "So far from being possessed by their things and feeling their possessions a burden the Eskimos are careless of them to the point of contempt material possessions hardly enter their scale of values and the giving of presents is regarded as a perversion." (G. de Poncins, Kabloona, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941.) .

.

.

Karl Menninger

228

of even such characters as Jeeter Lester, to say nothing of many more sophisticated ones, the passionate attachment to

dogs and cats and canaries and even pieces of furniture, the treasuring of collections by the hobbyist, or of his knife and

top by the small boy. These are useful forms of loving that should be cultivated and encouraged. The concentration of affection upon nonhuman objects .

.

.

sometimes described

in technical literature as infantile, or totemistic. The psychological process of substituting a part for the whole and identifying nonhuman objects with human beings, particularly the parents, and is

fetichistic,

them instead may, it is true, be carried to an extreme. They may absorb so much love and become so exaggerated in their relative importance that the expression of love for human objects is seriously impaired. One sees this

loving

in misers, and in persons who are very kind to animals but very unkind to their human associates. But kept within proper proportions the investment of love in nonhuman objects is not a symptom but a form or variety of love. It is a particularly necessary form for those people for whom human objects have been found unsatisfactory or insufficient, especially in childhood. To some extent this is always true; this

is

why

Sometimes

little girls it is

turn to dolls and

more extreme

.

.

little

boys to

trains.

.

In this connection we ought to mention the fact that one frequently sees the totemistic object treated ambivalently; I mean that hate as well as love can be directed toward these patient of mine who was nonhuman parental substitutes. an ardent and proficient duck-hunter did not recognize un-

A

far advanced in psychoanalytic treatment, which he undertook for quite a different reason, that as a child he had thought of his mother as a duck, because of a peculiar waddling gait caused by a bone disease which had led his uncle to refer to her as "an old duck." Unconsciously he had identified his mother with ducks long before he became adept at killing them.

til

Chapter 2 Leaving

now

the

nonhuman

object investment of love, /

am-

Love bivalently tinged with attention to the

little

or

many ways

much

in

against

Hate

229

we shall turn our which human beings attach hate,

themselves to one another in groups, in a supposedly nonsexual way. This has been called gregariousness and described by some, more eloquently than accurately, as due to a "herd instinct" similar to that which impels the flocking of certain birds and beasts into large assemblies. But there is no need to postulate any such special instinct. Men gather together at times for the simple reasons of greater economy or greater safety or greater power. But there are other gatherings that occur daily, in villages and by roadsides and hearthsides, in which the affection of people for each other is the moving spirit. In the custom to which our own country is so particularly given, of organizing clubs, societies, associations, unions, and the like, one can see a spontaneous tendency toward increasing the opportunities for loving and understanding one another. The words ascribed to Jesus, "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be also," are usually interpreted by the Church to refer to the circumstances under which religious services may be considered to have a '

quorum. But these words have a far more profound meaning. Where two or three people are gathered together, there is bound to be an exchange of feelings and the mutual stimis an unusual individual who does not to some extent enjoy meetings and gatherings, and we are all better for them. Freud ' ascribed the cohesiveness of the group to a common devotion to a leader, a devotion in which the hostile elements are kept in abeyance through a kind of tacit recog-

ulation of affection. It

nition that ultimately he

one of the followers,

—

the leader

—

Each follower thus identifies to some extent with all the other followThe successful leader must manage to keep the con-

hostilities.

leader, ers.

and hence

stantly accumulating aggressions of the

by directing them 7

be replaced by all mutual himself with the

will

who meanwhile suspend

W.

to this or that external

Trotter, Instincts of the

Herd

in Peace

group discharged danger or project.

and War, London, Benn,

1916.

Sigmund Freud, Grout) Psychology and don, Int. Psa. Press, 1922.

the Analysis of the Ego,

Lon-

230

Karl Menninger

Such a reinforcement and concentration of emotion is like a Leyden jar: it has an enormous potential and can be exploited by psychopathic leaders to accomplish great harm. Examples of this are to be seen in Adolf Hitler's career, in the lynching bee and other mobs, and even in some "good" organizations which suffer for a time under "bad" leaders. But honest leaders, who will not distort reality to manufacture "enemies" in order to increase internal solidarity, are far more numerous than dishonest and psychopathic

more conspicuous. And in organization and group association, formal and informal, there is an investment of love which is mutually reinforcing, and, hence, highly desirable. Fortunately, almost everyone can belong to some organization. I said "can"; let me say also "should." The value of

leaders; the latter are only

service clubs,

women's

clubs, literary clubs, medical socie-

labor unions, even political organizations and rallies, lies not so much in the practical things these organizations achieve as in the service they perform in uniting their members in a friendlier spirit. Along with many others, I have at various times made fun of the somewhat juvenile sentities,

mentaHsm

of

been wrong

some

of these organizations, but I think I have To the outsider it may seem a bit

in doing so.

ridiculous for a

bunch of grown men

to give a part of their

working hours to the joint singing of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." But the words of the song and even the singing of it have a deeper meaning than appears. Hayakawa " gives an illustration which I shall paraphrase. It is a hot, dusty day and you are in a hurry to reach some destination, when you hear the ominous and sinister sounds of a flat tire. In anger and frustration you pull the car to the side of the road, clamber out preparatory to soiling your hands, your clothes, and your disposition by replacing it. At this moment a farmer strolls up and asks the apparently casual question, "Gotta flat tire?" If one takes these words literally, one must conclude that the farmer is a fool or a blind man. But the psychological meaning of such an inquiry is quite different it is an awkward but somewhat conventionalized, way of saying some-

—

» S.

I.

Hayakawa, Language

in Action, Harcourt, Brace, 1941.

Love thing like the following: "Hello

—

I see

against

you are

Hate

231

in trouble.

I'm a stranger to you but I might be your friend now that I have a chance to be if I had any assurance that my friendship would be welcomed. Are you approachable? Are you a decent fellow? Would you appreciate it if I helped you? I would like to do so but I don't want to be rebuffed. This is what my voice sounds like. What does your voice sound like?"

Of course

this could be done in a more direct and busiway; the farmer could say, "I would be glad to help you, stranger." But people are too timid and mutually distrustful to be so direct. They want to hear one another's voices. People need reassurance that others are just like

nesslike

themselves. a good lawyer who does not have much ocupon Mr. Brown, president of the bank, and has a suspicion that Mr. Brown is a very crusty person who had best be let alone. He has no idea that Mr. Brown likes to sing "Sweet Adeline." Mr. Brown, on the other hand,

Mr. Jones

is

casion to call

who

frequently practises "Sweet Adeline" in the bathtub before parading to his very impressive bank, has secret ideas that Mr. Jones, the attorney, is a very intelligent, shrewd, and sophisticated fellow who would be disgusted to learn that the president of the bank sang in the bathtub or anywhere else. Therefore, when Mr. White, president of the Kiwanis Club, calls for a verse of "I Want a Girl Just Like

Dear Old Dad," what Mr. Brown and Mr. Jones learn about each other is not the fact that they were familiar with the same tune, but something a the Girl That Married

more important. Imperfect as clubs and organizations are in relieving individual loneliness, they do give practice in techniques of social intercourse, and they do furnish fellows who by joining the organization have indicated their accessibility to the other members. They offer a kind of reassurance against the fear of not belonging. The inherent danger in the group, the club, the society, the organization, however, seems to be the tendency to become static. The promise of a growth great deal

in friendship

is

often unfulfilled. There

is

rarely a suffi-

ciently strong central interest or unity of purpose to

keep

Karl Menninger

232

the group welded together in a sension, distrust, jealousy,

overwhelm the

common

goal; internal dis-

undue ambitiousness, and envy

erotic bond. Afraid of their

members shrink

own

hostilities,

and smaller units or cliques or compensate for their own hollowness by an overemphasis on the snobbishness and exclusiveness of the group. A typical example is the petty gossiping and mutual the

hostility of the

into

members

smaller

of the proverbial small-town sew-

ing circle.

more homogeneous the club, the greater The tendency of all groups to select members who in some way resemble each other leads to rivalry on the one hand and to staleness on the other. One prophylactic measure against this danger is the periodic infusion of new blood, the addition* of new members. This Naturally, the

the peril in this quarter.

requires a readjustment of the emotional linkages of aU

members and

affords intellectual stimulation as well. If the

differences between the

new members

are as great as their

resemblances, the club is strengthened to the extent that it can absorb the new and continue in a more cosmopolitan unity.

The person who can find resemblances in himself to many widely divergent groups has the chance to seek companionship in many places, and this is often the chief motivation in the person who is continually joining and organizing societies. What we see as a variety of interests in games, sports, hobbies, and study in one individual may actually be an unusually strong desire to know people and to be loved by them, which leads to an assiduousness in learning and doing what others are doing in order to be accepted in their circles.

am aware

som^

readers unfamiliar with psychodifficult to believe that the feelings of positive attraction that bind the members of groups and that bind doctor and patient are identical in nature with those bonds which exist between a lover and his sweetI

that

logical science will find

heart, or a

man and

it

his wife.

They

will fall

back upon the

conventional distinctions between liking and loving. But is no and loving

there

scientific justification for this distinction; liking

differ

only in intensity. If

we

leave aside large

Love against Hate

233

groups of people and think for a moment of those intimacies vyhich spring up between friends, let us say between two friends, there will be less difficulty in accepting the thesis. Whether it is between father and son, or father and daughter, or the fathers of two sons, the essential nature of the positive attraction and feeling is the same. It is true that it will be differently expressed, and this we shall presently discuss further.

The cultivation of friends and of friendships is certainly of more importance than is generally recognized. If friends are merely recreational resources or convenient distractions from the routine of life, the relationship with them is of

minimum

value psychologically; it can scarcely be called The man with no friends has already abandoned himself to the fate of his own self-destructiveness. Psychiatrists realize from clinical experience what poets have proclaimed in inspired verse, that to retreat permanently into the loneliness of one's own soul is to surrender one's claim friendship.

upon

life.

it is hard for human beings to really get tohard for even the best of friends to understand and to feel with one another sufficiently to promote a continuous, peaceful affection. This gives rise to that vague feeling with which we are all familiar of having parted from even our best friend without having fully expressed the affection we feel or fully realized the affection we hope he

But

gether;

at best it is

feels for us.

Observing the timid and conventional approaches which people make toward one another, the forced cordiality, the jovial and often crude "razzing" which they inflict on each other, the necessity many people feel to have a few drinks in order to "break the ice" and to feel closer to one another, the fatigue that sets in so quickly after a social round, one cannot help sensing the tremendous striving for love, appreciation and companionship that all people have, and also the barriers that prevent their receiving these gifts in full measure. Ferenczi said, "They want to love one another but they don't know how." Frustrated and hungry for a word, a touch, a smile, a shared experience that would satisfy this universal hunger, many people try feverishly to

234

Karl Menninger

the void with semblances of love: activity, popularity, there are thousands of ways of exphilanthropy, prestige

fill

—

tracting recognition in lieu of love,

none of them

satisfac-,

tory. less by the feeling that we are not appreby a dread, more or less dimly felt by everyone, lest others see through our masks, the masks of repression that have been forced upon us by convention and culture. It is this that leads us to shun intimacy, to maintain friendships on a superficial level, to underestimate and fail to

Love

is

impaired

ciated than

appreciate others lest they

come

to appreciate us only too

well. initial contact between two persons, each impress the other with a certain presentable front, a mixture of conventional and personal ideals. From this inevitably emerges, however, an expression of needs which either clash or reciprocate. In the latter case a friendship is begun through mutual satisfactions offered and received, with many reservations and concealments in the background. As time goes on and friendship "develops," more and more of this background material is revealed and friends become better "acquainted." Before complete identification in friendship or love can occur there must be some mutual understanding, and for the accomplishment of this we must study one another as well as ourselves. It is amazing how many friends, even marital partners, live out their lives in complete ignorance of one another's natures be-

Hence, in an

tries to

—

yond certain mechanical externals. Love is experienced as a pleasure in proximity, a desire for fuller knowledge of one another, a yearning for mutual identification and personality fusion. This we show to one another by our efforts to be understood, and by indulging

To be understood means, of course, that some of our worst impulses as well as our best ones are recognized by our friend, who knows all about us and likes us, anyway. Once this mutual understanding and identification are established, friendship merges into love. And how is it shown? "They do not love that do not show their love." In the vast majority of instances our love for one another is the less imperious longing to understand.

a

Love against Hate

235

expressed in nonphysical ways, in the interchange of ideas or the common enjoyment of some pleasure. One of the

time-honored forms is the ritual of eating (or drinking) tofood is the first expression of love which

gether. Being given

the child understands;

it is

his introduction to love.

Hence

the symbolic value of being fed remains high throughout

=

Love. It is understandable, In the unconscious Food why the dinner party or the social luncheon, for all its banality, is a perpetual medium of friendship. One of the first impulses of two people attracted to each other is to eat together, and while these occasions are generally thought of as mere expedients opportunities for conversation or a setting for courtship the symbolic meaning of the eating " is deeper than the conscious meaning of the words exchanged. The Christian religion recognizes this in the institution of a service in which an act of eating is actually designated "communion." The sharing of food as an expression of love, going back as it does to the maternal function of nursing, leads directly to the allied form of expressing love the giving of gifts. The child has little to give in return for the food given him, but that little he tries to give. As he grows older his gifts become more substantial, and represent increasingly sacrifice of something prized by him. The gift expresses love because it symbolizes the giver himself or an important part of himself; it may even be his life "greater love hath no man than this." Thus the gift is more than a bribe, a purchase price life.

therefore,

— —

—

—

—

—

we rebel in our minds against the thought "bought" or "earned" or "repaid"; nevertheless, it is a fact that a certain exchange is made and a certain balance is inevitably established. We do measure love and weigh it, even if not accurately. We are most inaccurate when we assume that the balance is in the favor of the recipient rather than the giver. That it is more blessed to give than to receive is psychologically true because giving offered for love; that love

is

that eating has an unconsdous aggressive to the primitive customs of devouring one's Against Himself, pages 40-46 and 122-123.) In the normal individual this meaning is deeply buried, while the erotic meaning is very near the surface of consciousness. 1*^

It

is

also

true,

of course,

meaning which extends back enemies.

(See

Man

236

Karl Menninger

while expressing it. "The mother gives By her giving she creates her love. To create love we must begin by sacrifice. Afterwards it is love that makes the sacrifices. But it is we who must take the first step." " Here then is a practical suggestion for the foslove

stimulates

[milk] to the child.

tering of love. in which love can be fostered is by talking has been said, in various forms and by several writers, that speech was given us for the purpose of disguising our thoughts. We do use it so, no doubt; and yet understanding does come through words finally, through many words and through more than words, for actions speak louder. Especially differences, disagreements, and dissatisor lovers. The factions should be talked out by friends reason that the course of true love never does run smoothly is the fact that true love can endure only if the provocations of anger and resentment which inevitably develop are freely expressed and discussed and readjusted to. I certainly do not mean wrangling; both parties must make some conscientious effort to achieve objectivity and not simply indulge in temper tantrums. "A soft answer turneth away wrath but grievous words stir up [more] anger." It always seemed to me significant that among the Jews, where there is such a noticeable tendency to express aggressions in

Another way

together.

It

—

—

argument and verbal combat, there are so few divorces and little physical violence. It is my idea that, even if the Roman Catholic church did not forbid it, divorce would still be infrequent among the Irish and Italians, because of their so

relatively great facility in expressing their emotions. It

is

often assumed by the silent, dignified, sulky Anglo-Saxon that the avoidance of verbal or even physical conflict be-

tween husband and wife promotes peace and happiness. story of the European peasant woman who wept because her husband had not beaten her for a month seems grotesquely and pathetically amusing, but it is psychologically true. If a woman has to choose between being ignored and being beaten she will certainly choose the latter. Although this might be construed as a recommendation of wife-beating, that is certainly not what I mean; I do mean

The

"Antoine de Saint-Exup^ry,

Flight to Arras, Reynal

&

Hitchcock, 1942.

,

Love against Hate

237

cannot be repressed or diverted, it is better to have them out than to have them in. Women, as a rule, have a greater fondness than men for "talking things over." They have some compulsion to discuss all the aspects of an interpersonal problem which men often shun, sometimes with justification. To such questions as, "Why didn't you remember our anniversary?" or "Why don't you love me more?" the real answer is unknown; the reasons are unconscious, and the man realizes this even if he knows nothing about psychoanalysis; he knows that anything he says is "wrong." His refusal to say anything, however, is frustrating to the woman. If we were to draw practical conclusions, we might say that such problems ought to be talked out more than they generally are and less than that

if

hostilities

some women want them to be. Perhaps more important than believe listening to be one of the

talking

is

just listening. I

most powerful and

influen-

techniques of human intercourse. The principal element uncritical in the technique of psychoanalysis is listening but attentive listening. good many hundreds of pages have been written about this in the technical literature, but I do not recall anything else so eloquent and, at the same time, so sound as an article by Brenda Ueland, published not in the Psychoanalytic Review, not in the American Journal of Psychiatry, not in the Journal of the American Medical Association (where perhaps it should have been) but in The Ladies' Home Journal! In the issue for November 1941 Miss Ueland writes: tial

—

A

Listening force.

.

.

.

is

The

a magnetic and strange thing, a creative friends that listen to us are the ones we

move toward, and we want it

to

sit

in their radius as

did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

.

.

.

though

When we

are

makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life. ... It makes people happy and free when they are lis-

listened to,

it

creates us,

When we listen to people there is an alterto. nating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. are constantly being re-created.

tened

.

.

.

We

Now there

are brilliant people

who cannot listen much.

Karl Menninger

238

They have no ingoing wires on

their apparatus.

They

are

because these lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to talk, do not let us express our thoughts and expand; and it is this expressing and expanding that makes the little creative fountain inside us begin to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected laughter and wisentertaining but exhausting too. I think

it is

dom. I

discovered

all this

about three years ago, and truly life. Before that,

made a revolutionary change in my when I went to a party I would think it

anxiously:

"Now

Say bright things. Talk. Don't let down." And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of coffee to keep this up. But now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they talk; to try to

try hard.

Be

lively.

know them without my mind

pressing against theirs, or

arguing, or changing the subject.

No.

My

attitude

is:

more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be won"Tell

me

derfully alive."

I

.

.

.

have quoted Miss Ueland's

article

because

it

is

said

more feelingly than I could say it. The technique of listening was not invented by the psychoanalysts; it was only developed by them, and it is clear that Miss Ueland knows about it intuitively. She is discerning enough to recognize that the power of listening derives more

effectively,

from the affection that it represents and the affection that from putting oneself in the other person's place.

springs

This capacity for identification is not given to all people. I confess I cannot decide in my own mind whether love is determined by identification or identification by love. All that I am sure of is that they go together. This does not contradict what I have previously said, that some identifications are unconsciously hostile in intent; I am not speaking now of unconscious identification, the psychological process I am speaking of conscious identification, the

—

i

Love

against

Hate

239

conscious attempt to imagine or to perceive how the other fellow feels. This is an art; perhaps it is the basic art of love. At any rate, it is difficult for love to flourish without it.

Identification leads by extension to a wish for fusion. This fusion may be idealistic, it may be intellectual, it may be social, it may be physical. In a general way, these are the steps in the program of love. In his Symposium, Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes the following legendary explanation of this striving for fusion:

Human

nature was once quite other than now. Origiwere three sexes, three and not as today two; besides the male and the female there existed a third sex which had an equal share in the first two. ... In these beings everything was double; thus they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two genital parts, and so on. Then Zeus allowed himself to be persuaded to cut these beings in two, as one divides pears to stew them. When all nature was divided in this way, to each human being came the longing for his own other half, and the two halves embraced and entwined their bodies and desired to grow together again. nally, there

.

.

.

To accomplish this fusion is the object To promote it in every known way

pulse.

tion for happier living.

We

of the love imis the prescriphave spoken of the function of

eating together, exchanging gifts, talking and listening to one another for the furtherance of this mutual identifica-

Two more practical devices which can be used in the furtherance of the process are work and play. Working together has been made difficult for husbands and wives by the advance of civilization. On the contrary, the increasing subdivision of labor and the development of co-operative enterprise whereby many people work together on a project has developed other outlets for love, especially for men, which wives frequently feel to be a threat to marital love or a distraction from it. There is no question but that people who work together grow to love one another. But it is a mistake to assume that love is a limited quantity which if expressed in one direction and

tion.

240

Karl Menninger

toward one object is thereby subtracted from another. The capacity for love normally increases with the opportunities and occasions given it for development; the man who is loved and beloved by his fellow workmen is usually the man who loves and is loved by his wife. The real danger in working apart from each other is the separation of interests and the consequent loss of opportunity for sharing experiences

—

the opportunity that provides further identification. that they can work tofeel the necessity of de-

Many husbands and wives find gether fruitfully. But many others

fending themselves against too complete an identification with each other, and these keep their work as a kind of island of separateness, a domain of their own. This is particularly true of the man who feels that his masculine independence is threatened by feminine help, or of the woman who fears that her personality will be submerged in a man's children and a ambitions. And, of course, real obstacles make it impossible lack of similar educational preparation for most couples to work at the same occupation, even if

—

—

they wish to do so. Nevertheless, the more people work together the more tolerance, understanding, and love they tend to have for each other; and wise husbands and wives will find ways to utilize this fact in such projects as

for their

own home,

planting

its

making furniture

grounds, keeping accounts,

and sharing the care of their children. But if working together has been made harder for husbands and wives, playing together has been made easier. The increasing participation of women in sports is one evidence of this, and a salutary sign. The great numbers of people who swim together, hike together, play together, attend football games together, speak for the intuitive recognition of the generation of love by the joint experience of the pleasure of recreation. All this proves that in addition to the harmless discharge of aggressions involved in play there

is

a fostering

and reinforcing of love by the simul-

taneous enjoyment of play. The more people play together the better they like one another. Family outings and vacation trips certainly do far more to promote morality and prevent divorce than the League of Decency.

Chapter 3

There remains to be discussed finally the function of physical union in the expression and cultivation of love. Logical and obvious though this may be, it is a curious fact that until relatively recent times love was not considered an aspect of the sexual life. In discussing this, Havelock Ellis said " that while our concept of love is found, it is true, among some lower races, its development in Occidental civilization was slow.

The Greek

poets, except the latest,

showed

little

recog-

nition of love as an element of marriage. Theognis

com-

pared marriage with cattle-breeding. The Romans of the Republic took much the same view. Greeks and Romans alike regarded breeding as the one recognizable object of marriage; any other object was mere wantonness and had better, they thought, be carried on outside marriage. Religion, which preserves so many ancient and primitive conceptions of life, has consecrated this conception also, and Christianity ... at the outset offered only the choice between celibacy on the one hand and, on the other, marriage for the production of offspring.

Yet, from an early period in human history, a secondary function of sexual intercourse had been slowly growing up to become one of the great objects of marriage. Among animals, it may be said, and even sometimes in man, the sexual impulse, when once aroused, makes but a short and swift circuit through the brain to reach its consummation. But as the brain and its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever longer, slower, more painful paths before it reaches and sometimes it never reaches its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with

— .

—

»

12 Havelock Ellis, On Life City Pub. Co., 1937, 1:64-66.

—

.

.

and Sex: Essays

of

Love and Virtue, Garden

— Karl Menninger

242

high adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. The primitive animal instinct, having the sole end of procreation, becomes on its way to that end the inspiring stimulus to all those psychic energies which in civilization

we count most

precious. This function

is

we

thus,

by-product. But, as we know, even in our human factories, the by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product. see, a

all that has been said popular attitude towards sexual pleasure is still largely a mixture of salaciousness and shame. Such pleasure is still regarded officially as some-

It is

surely

and done

no

secret that, despite

scientifically, the

thing incidental to the serious business of procreation, and

—apart from am

that

—

sinful, bestial,

and unmentionable.

.

.

.

not such a dreamer as to suppose that any words or, for that matter, anything that a thousand of mine psychiatrists or ten thousand philosophers might say could revolutionize or even considerably alter the prevalent social attitudes. Yet we know that they do change, that they are changing, and this gives us some hope for the future and some encouragement to speak out our thoughts, howI

—

ever feeble their effect may seem to be. That the world does change in its attitudes is hard for us to realize: it seems incredible that less than sixty years ago a book of poems by that most conventional, trite, Victorian poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, should have been assailed with fury as "immoral" a fact as incredible as is the fact that the man

—

whom

Miss Wheeler had just become engaged wistfully pleaded with her to withdraw the book from publication.^^ to

Not only

in regard to sex, but in regard to

all

human

been a vast change in social attitudes. In spite of human frailties and errors, we may ultimately achieve a less artificial, more psychologically sound civirights there has

lization. It

is

not impossible to conceive of a time

the expression of love

—

fests itself

"

will

in all the

be as natural, as

Katherine Woods, in a review in the

1940, of Period Piece: Jenny Ballou. 4,

—

The

Life

which spontaneous, and forms

in

New York Times

tnd Times

of Ella

it

as

when mani-

mag-

"Books," Feb. Wheeler Wilcox by

Love nificently organized as

the present

is

against

Hate

243

the expression of rage and hate at

moment. ...

But before that day comes we shall have learned more about ourselves. We shall have conceded the existence of evil within us, of aggressive tendencies that cannot be permitted to find their expression spontaneously, following a course of least resistance. We shall have revised our ways of living to include more play, and our ways of working to insure more joy in work. The study of the child and the threats to his development will have been recognized not as a pretty little hobby for a few earnest missionaries and pedants but as a task equal in importance to the study of the stock-market and the compounding of poisonous gases. We shall have put a higher estimate upon the beautiful as a criterion of creativeness. "When we discern the influence of creation predominating we are moved by something we caU beauty, when we see destruction we recoil at the ugly. Our need for beauty springs from the gloom and pain which we experience from our destructive impulses to our good and loved objects; our wish is to find in art evidence of the triumph of life over death; we recognize the

power of death when we say a thing is ugly."" We shall have gained the courage in that day to hate what is ugly. We shall have accorded to love the pre-eminence which it deserves in our scale of values; we shall seek it and proclaim it as the highest virtue and the greatest boon. We shall not be ashamed to have "suffered much extremity for is the medicine for the sickness of the world, a prescription often given, too rarely taken. shall have realigned our faith in God to

love," in the full realization that love

We

include

more

faith in

tifications to include

and daughters is

human more

in a vastly

and extended our iden-

beings,

brothers,

more

sisters,

more sons

wider family concept. "For love

the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole

is

called love." Plato said this, even before Jesus taught that

"God

is

love,"

which means the same

thing.

This goal is not unattainable in spite of past errors and present vicissitudes. For we have the courage to hope and

" John Rickman, "The Nature

of Ugliness

Int. /. Psa., 21:294-313, July 1930, p. 313.

and the Creative Impulse,"

244

Karl Menninger

power to love. And for all the evil within us, we cannot escape the will to Hve. From that springs our determination to better our lot. By the use of our intelHgence and our knowledge we can use the slave of science for the promotion of human happiness. Speed the dayl the

part three

The Power of Love

17.

Love and Let Love

D. H. Lawrence

Called by the critic F. R. Leavis the greatest creative Lawrence challenged the dehumanizing trends in modem life. recent biographer points out that Lawrence was "very near the centre of a great revolution of sensibility that may be uncompleted yet." The indomitable vitality of Lawrence's ideas resists cynicism and makes him still one of the sharpest analysts of the decay of contemporary ideals. For Lawrence love is the integrating adventure which opens up our vision of reality and gives us strength to struggle against fate. In this essay, originally titled "Do Women Change?", Lawrence exhorts us in his characteristically intimate, ebullient style to stop seeking for the point of love and to flow naturally and unsentimentally into the intermingling stream of feelings that love is. Reprinted from Assorted Articles by D. H. Lawrence, copyright 1928, 1929, 1930 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. writer in English of our time, D. H.

A

.

.

.

Love and Let Love

They

teU of all the things that are going to happen in the babies bred in bottle, all the love-nonsense cut out,

future

—

women bosh.

indistinguishable

We

Uke

to imagine

from men. But

we

it

seems to

are something very

me

new on

'246

D. H. Lawrence

it seems to me we flatter ourselves. Motor-cars and aeroplanes are something novel, if not something new one could draw a distinction. But the people in them are merely people, and not many steps up, if any, it seems to me, from the people who went in litters or palanquins or chariots, or who walked on foot from Egypt to Jordan, in the days of Moses. Humanity seems that to have an infinite capacity for remaining the same

the face of the earth. But

—

—

is,

human. Of course, there

are all kinds of ways of being human; expect almost every possible kind is alive and kicking to-day. There are Httle Cleopatras and Zenobias and Semiramises and Judiths and Ruths, and even Mother Eves, to-

but

I

day

just the

same

as in all the endless yesterdays.

make them

Circum-

Cleopatras and little Semiramises instead of big ones, because our age goes in for quantity regardless of quality. But sophisticated people are sophisticated people, no matter whether it is Egypt or Atlantis. And sophisticated people are pretty well all alike. All that varies is the proportion of "modern" people to all the other stances

little

unmodern

sorts, the sophisticated to the unsophisticated. to-day there is a huge majority of sophisticated people. And they are probably very little different from all the other sophisticated people of all the other civilisations,

And

man was man. And women are just part

since

of the human show. They aren*t something apart. They aren't something new on the face of the earth, like the loganberry or artificial silk. Women are as sophisticated as men, anyhow, and they were neve anything but women, and they are nothing but women to-day, whatever they may think of themselves. They sa' the modern woman is a new type. But is she? I expect, in fact I am sure, there have been lots of women like ours in the past, and if you'd been married to one of them, you wouldn't have found her any different from your present wife. Women are women. They only have phases. In Rome, in Syracuse, in Athens, in Thebes, more than two or three thousand years ago, there was the bob-haired, painted, perfumed Miss and Mrs. of to-day, and she inspired almost

Love and Let Love and Mrses. inspire I

—

a modern young man modern young woman leaning on an hotel balcony

saw

and

men.

in the

a

a joke in a

German paper

overlooking the sea. He: "See the stars sinking

at night,

down over the dark restless ocean!" She: "Cut room number is 32!" That ''Cut

My

modem: the very modem women in Capri under Tiberias said their Roman and Campanian lovers in just And women in Alexandria in Cleopatra's

believe

I

out" to

it

out!

it

supposed to be very

is

woman. But the

247

perfumed Misses

exactly the feelings that our painted and

same way.

time. Certain phases of history are "modem." As the wheel of history goes round women become "moderai," then they become unmodem again. The Roman women of the late Empire were most decidedly "modem" so were the

—

women

Ptolemaic

of

women. Only

Egypt.

True

modem

cut-it-out

the hotels were run differently.

Modernity or modernism isn't something we've It's something that comes at the end of

vented.

tions. Just as leaves in

the end of every tian, etc.

autumn

known

are yellow, so the

just incivilisa-

women

at

—Roman, Greek, Egyp-

civilisation

—have been modern. They were

chic, they said cut-it-out,

and they did

smart, they were

as they jolly well

pleased.

And then, after all, how woman? You give her

in a

don't give a

woman

cuts

it

it

is

out

deep does modemness go? Even a run for her

her, she takes

it.

The

—

all

the stars

—Come

if

you

modemness

—

in

Oh, cut it out, boy! So the boy and ocean stuff. My room num-

that she says:

ber's thirty-two!

money; and

sign of

—

to the point!

But the point, when you come to

it, is a very bare little very meagre little affair. It's extraordinary how meagre the point is once you've come to it. It's not much better than a full-stop. So the modern girl comes to the point brutally and repeatedly, to find that her life is a series of full-stops, then a mere string of dots. Cut it out, When she comes to dot number one thousand, boy! she's getting about tired of dots, and of the plain point she's come to. The point is all too plain and too obvious. It

place,

a

.

.

.

248 is

D. H. Lawrence

so pointed that

dots

comes

it

a blank

is

—a

Following the series of dead blank. There's nothing left

pointless.

to cut out. Blank-eye!

Then the thoroughly modern girl begins to moan: Oh, boy, do put something in again! And the thoroughly modern boy, having cut it out so thoroughly that it will never grow again, tunes up with: I can't give you anyAnd the thoroughly modern girl thing but love, Baby! accepts it with unction. She knows it's nothing but a most crest-fallen echo from the sentimental past. But when

—

—

you've cut everything out so that it will never grow again, you are thankful even for echoes from a sentimental past. And so the game begins again. Having cut it out, and brought it down to brass tacks, you find brass tacks are Oh, boy, aren't the last thing you want to lie down on. you going to do something about it? And the boy, having cut it all out so that it won't grow again, has no other bright inspiration but to turn the brass tacks round, when lo, they become the brass-headed nails that go around Victorian plush furniture. And there they are, the hypermodern two. No, women don't change. They only go through a rather regular series of phases. They are first the slave; then the obedient helpmeet; then the respected spouse; then the noble matron; then the splendid woman and citizen; then the independent female; then the modern girl, oh, cut-it-out, boy! And when the boy has cut it all out, the mills of God grind on, and having nothing else to grind, they grind

—

the cut-it-out girl down, down,

know where

—but probably

down

—

—back —we to

to the slave once more,

don't

and the

whole cycle starts afresh, on and on, till in the course of a thousand years or two we come once more to the really "modern" girl. Oh, cut it out, boy! A lead-pencil has a point, an argument may have a point, remarks may be pointed, and a man who wants to borrow five pounds from you only comes to the point when he asks you for the fiver. Lots of things have points: especially weapons. But where is the point to life? Where is the point to love? Where, if it comes to the point, is the point to r bunch of violets? There is no point. Life and love are life

Love and Let Love bunch of

249

and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless. Now women used to understand this better than men. Men, who were keen on weapons, which all have points, used to insist on putting points to life and love. But women and

love, a

bunch of

violets

is

a

violets,

used to know better. They used to know that life is a flow, a soft curving flow, a flowing together and a flowing apart and a flowing together again, in a long subtle motion that has no full-stops and no points, even if there 'are rough places. Women used to see themselves as a softly flowing stream of attraction and desire and beauty, soft quiet rivers of energy and peace. Then suddenly the idea changes. They see themselves as isolated things, independent females, instruments, instruments for love, instruments for work, instruments for politics, instruments for pleasure, this, that and the other. And as instruments they become pointed and they want everything, even a small child, even love itself, to have a point. When women start coming to the point, they don't hesitate. They pick a daisy, and they say: There must be a point to this daisy, and I'm going to get at it. So they start pulling off the white petals, till there are none left. Then they pull away the yellow bits of the centre, and come to a mere green part, still without having come to the point. Then in disgust they tear the green base

—

of the flower across, and say:

had no point

to

I call

that a fool flower. It

it!

not a question of points, but a question of flow. you come to think of it, a daisy even is like a little river flowing, that never for an instant stops. From the time when the tiny knob of a bud appears down among the leaves, during the slow rising up a stem, the slow swelling and pushing out the white petaltips from the green, to the full round daisy, white and gold and gay, that opens and shuts through a few dawns, a few nights, poised on the summit of her stem, then silently shrivels and mysteriously disappears, there is no stop, no halt, it is a perpetual little streaming of a gay little life out into full radiance and delicate shrivelling, like a perfect litLife

It's

is

the flow that matters. If

—

250 tie

Simone de Beauvoir

fountain that flows and flows, and shoots

into the invisible, even then without

any

away

at last

stop.

and especially with love. There is no nothing you can cut out, except falsity, which isn't love or life. But the love itself is a flow, two little streams of feeling, one from the woman, one from the man, that flow and flow and never stop, and sometimes they twinkle with stars, sometimes they chafe, but still they flow on, intermingling; and if they rise to a floweriness like a daisy, that is part of the flow; and they will inevitably die down again, which is also part of a flow. And one relationship may produce many flowerinesses, as a daisy plant produces many daisies; but they will all die down again as the summer passes, though the green plant itself need not die. If flowers didn't fade they wouldn't be flowers, they'd be artificial things. But there are roots to faded flowers and in the root the flow continues and continues. And only the flow matters; live and let live, love and let love. There is no point to love. So

is

it

point.

with

There

18.

life,

is

The Woman

in

Love

Simone de Beauvoir

The

difference in their existential situations rather than laws of nature accounts for the difference men and women show in their conceptions of love, Simone de Beauvoir says.

Without love the woman is nonexistent. The man possesses and integrates the beloved woman into istence; while she finds her destiny in abdication.

woman loved.

will nt>t fully yield unless she believes she

The

is

his ex-

But a deeply

man woman

esteem, affection and admiration of the

eliminates the sense of abasement by offering the

a

in love

way toward transcendence This, in outline,

is

of her essential dependence. the theme of this chapter drawn from

The

Woman

Love

in

251

Mme. de

Beauvoir's profound and unique study, The Second Sex, which challenges many interpretations and myths of the feminine personality. leading French intellectual, with her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, Simone de Beauvoir has written plays, essays and novels including The Blood

A

The Mandarins. Reprinted from The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, translated from the French by H. M. Parshley, copyright 1952 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. of Others and

The Woman

in

Love

means the same sense for both one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them. Byron well said: "Man's love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence." Nietzsche

The word sexes,

and

love has by no

this

expresses the

The

is

same idea

single

things for

in

word love

The Gay Science: in fact signifies

two

man and woman. What woman clear enough:

different

understands

is not only devotion, it is a without reservation, without regard for anything whatever. This unconditional nature of her love is what makes it a faith,^ the only one she ^ has. As for man, if he loves a woman, what he wants is that love from her; he is in consequence far from postulating the same sentiment for himself as for woman; if there should be men who also felt that desire for complete abandonment, upon my word, they would not be

by love

is

total gift of

Men have

body and

found

it

it

soul,

possible to be passionate lovers at cer-

tain times in their lives, but there

could be called "a great lover"; 1 2

Nietzsche's italics. the sense that

In

amoureuse."

—Tr.

a

woman may

^

is

not one of them

in their

most violent

sometimes be called

who

trans-

"une grande

— 252

Simone de Beauvoir

even on their knees before a mistress, what they still want is to take possession of her; at the very heart of their lives they remain sovereign subjects; the beloved woman is only one value among others; they wish to integrate her into their existence and not to squander it entirely on her. For woman, on the contrary, to love is to relinquish everything for the benefit of a master. As Cecile Sauvage puts it: "Woman must forget her own personality when she is in love. It is a law of nawoman is nonexistent v/ithout a master. Without a ture. master, she is a scattered bouquet." The fact is that we have nothing to do here with laws of nature. It is the difference in their situations that is reflected in the difference men' and women show in their conceptions

ports, they never abdicate completely;

A

of love. The individual who is a subject, who is himself, if he has the courageous inclination toward transcendence, endeavors to extend his grasp on the world: he is ambi-

he acts. But an inessential creature is incapable of sensing the absolute at the heart of her subjectivity; a being doomed to immanence cannot find self-realization in acts. Shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the

tious,

male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal, the woman who has not repressed her claim to humanity will dream of transcending her being toward one of these superior beings, of amalgamating herself with the sovereign subject. There is no other way out for her than to lose herself, body and soul, in him who is represented to her as the absolute, as the essential. Since she is anyway doomed to dependence, she will prefer to serve a god rather than obey tyrants parents, husband, or protector. She chooses to desire her enslavement so ardently that it will seem to her the expression of her liberty; she will try to rise above her situation as inessential object by fully accepting it; through her flesh, her feelings, her behavior, she will enthrone him as supreme value and reality: she will humble herself to nothingness before him. Love becomes for her a religion. As we have seen, the adolescent girl wishes at first to identify herself with males; when she gives that up, she then seeks to share in their masculinity by having one of

— The them

Woman

in

Love

253

not the individuahty of this one or that one which attracts her; she is in love with man in general.' "And you, the men I shall love, how I await you!" writes Irene Reweliotty. "How I rejoice to think I shall know you soon: especially You, the first." Of course the male is to belong to the same class and race as hers, for sexual privilege is in play only within this frame. If man is to be a demigod, he must first of all be a human being, and to the colonial officer's daughter the native is not a man. If the young girl gives herself to an "inferior," it is for the reason that she wishes to degrade herself because she believes she is unworthy of love; but normally she is looking for a man who represents male superiority. She is soon to ascertain that many individuals of the favored sex are sadly contingent and earthbound, but at first her presumption is favorable to them; they are called on less to prove their worth than to avoid too gross a disproof of it which accounts for many mistakes, some of them serious. naive young girl is caught by the gleam of virility, and in her eyes male worth is shown, according to circumstances, by physical strength, distinction of manner, wealth, cultivation, intelligence, authority, social status, a military uniform; but what she always wants is for her lover to represent the essence of manhood. Familiarity is often sufficient to destroy his prestige; it may collapse at the first kiss, or in daily association, or durin love

with her;

it is

—

A

ing

the

wedding

night.

Love

at

a

distance, however,

is

only a fantasy, not a real experience. The desire for love becomes a passionate love only when it is carnally realized. Inversely, love can arise as a result of physical intercourse; in this case the sexually dominated woman acquires an exalted view of a man who at first seemed to her quite insignificant.

But it often happens that a woman succeeds in deifying none of the men she knows. Love has a smaller place in woman's life than has often been supposed. Husband, children, home, amusements, social duties, vanity, sexuality, career, are much more important. Most women dream of 3

lar

Haenigsen's newspaper comic strip "Penny" gives never flagging popuexpression to this truth. Tr.

254

Simone de Beauvoir

grand amour, a soul-searing love. They have known substitutes, they have been close to it; it has come to them in partial, bruised, ridiculous, imperfect, mendacious forms; but very few have truly dedicated their lives to it. The grandes amoureuses are most often women who have not frittered themselves away in juvenile affairs; they have first accepted the traditional feminine destiny: husband, home, children; or they have known pitiless solitude; or they have banked on some enterprise that has been more or a

And when

they glimpse the opportunity by dedicating it to some superior person, they desperately give themselves up to this d'Agoult were hope. Mile Aisse, Juliette Drouet, and almost thirty when their love-life began, Julie de Lespinasse

less

of a failure.

to salvage a disappointing life

Mme

not far from forty. No other aim in life which seemed worth while was open to them, love was their only way out. Even if they can choose independence, this road seems the most attractive to a majority of women: it is agonizing for a woman to assume responsibility for her life. Even the male, when adolescent, is quite willing to turn to older women for guidance, education, mothering; but customary attitudes, the boy's training, and his own inner imperatives forbid him to content himself in the end with the easy solution of abdication; to him such affairs with older women are only a stage through which he passes. It fortune in adulthood as in early childhood

—

is

—

man's good

to be obliged

most arduous roads, but the surest; it is woman's misfortune to be surrounded by almost irresistible temptations; everything incites her to follow the easy slopes; insead of being invited to fight her own way up, she is told that she has only to let herself slide and she will attain paradises of enchantment. When she perceives that she has been duped by a mirage, it is too late; her strength has been exhausted in a losing venture. The psychoanalysts are wont to assert that woman seeks the father image in her lover; but it is because he is a man, not because he is a father, that he dazzles the girl child, and every man shares in this magical power. Woman does not long to reincarnate one individual in another, but to reconstruct a situation: that which she experienced as a litto take the

The

Woman

in

Love

255

under adult protection. She was deeply integrated with home and family, she knew the peace of quasi-passivity. Love will give her back her mother as well as her father, it will give her back her childhood. What she wants tie girl,

to recover

from

is

a roof over her head, walls that prevent her

feeling her

abandonment

wide world, authority

in the

that protects her against her liberty. This childish

drama

many women;

they are happy to be called "my little girl, my dear child"; men know that the words: "you're just like a little girl," are among those that most surely touch a woman's heart. We have seen that many women suffer in becoming adults; and so a great number remain obstinately "babyish," prolonging their childhood indefinitely in manner and dress. To become like a child again in a man's arms fills their cup with joy. The hackneyed theme: "To feel so little in your arms, my love," recurs again and again in amorous dialogue and in love letters. "Baby mine," croons the lover, the woman calls

haunts the love of

herself "your

"When

little

A

one," and so on.

young woman

will

he come, he who can dominate me?" And when he comes, she will love to sense his manly superiority. A neurotic studied by Janet illustrates this attiwrite:

will

tude quite clearly: All my foolish acts and all the good things I have done have the same cause: an aspiration for a perfect and ideal love in which I can give myself completely, entrust my being to another, God, man, or woman, so superior to me that I will no longer need to think what Someone to to do in life or to watch over myself. who will bear me obey blindly and with confidence up and lead me gently and lovingly toward perfection. How I envy the ideal love of Mary Magdalen and Jesus: to be the ardent disciple of an adored and worthy master; to live and die for him, my idol, to win at last the victory of the Angel over the beast, to rest in his pro.

.

.

.

.

.

arms, so small, so lost in his loving care, so wholly his that I exist no longer.

tecting

Many

examples have already shown us that

this

dream

Simone de Beauvoir

256

of annihilation is in fact an avid will to exist. In all religions the adoration of God is combined with the devotee's concern with personal salvation; when woman gives her-

completely to her idol, she hopes that he will give her once possession of herself and of the universe he represents. In most cases she asks her lover first of all for the justification, the exaltation, of her ego. Many women do self

at

not abandon themselves to love unless they are loved in return; and sometimes the love shown them is enough to arouse their love. The young girl dreamed of herself as seen through men's eyes, and it is in men's eyes that the woman believes she has finally found herself. Cecile Sau-

vage writes:

To walk by your

side, to step

forward with

my

little

them so tiny in their highheeled shoes with felt tops, makes me love all the love you throw around me. The least movements of my hands you

feet that

in

my

voice,

love, to feel

my arms, of with happiness.

muff, of fill

me

my

face, the tones of

my

The woman in love feels endowed with a high and undeniable value; she is at last allowed to idolize herself through the love she inspires. She is overjoyed to find in her lover a witness. This is what Colette's Vagabonde declares

:

I

admit

I

yielded, in permitting this

a friend, but an eager spectator of son.

.

.

.

one day,

One must be to

man

to

him not

the next day, to the desire to keep in

my

terribly old,

life

come back a lover, not

and

Margot

my

said to

per-

me

renounce the vanity of living under some-

one's gaze.

In one of her letters to Middleton Murry, Katherine Mansfield wrote that she had just bought a ravishing mauve corset; she at once added: "Too bad there is no one to see it!" There is nothing more bitter than to feel oneself but the flower, the perfume, the treasure, which is the object of no desire: what kind of wealth is it that does not enrich

The

Woman

in

Love

257

myself and the gift of which no one wants? Love is the developer that brings out in clear, positive detail the dim negative, otherwise as useless as a blank exposure. Through love, woman's face, the curves of her body, her childhood meqiories, her former tears, her gowns, her accustomed ways, her universe, everything she is, all that belongs to her, escape contingency and become essential: she is a wondrous offering at the foot of the altar of her god. This transforming power of love explains why it is that men of prestige who know how to flatter feminine vanity will arouse passionate attachments even if they are quite lacking in physical charm. Because of their lofty positions they embody the Law and the Truth: their perceptive powers disclose an unquestionable reality. The woman who finds favor in their sight feels herself transformed into a priceless treasure. D'Annunzio's success was due to this, as Isadora Duncan explains in the introduction to My Life:

When D'Annunzio loves a woman, he lifts her spirit from this earth to the divine region where Beatrice moves and shines. In turn he transforms each woman to a part of the divine essence, he carries her aloft until she

... He flung over each favorite in turn a shining veil. She rose above the heads of ordinary mortals and walked surrounded by a strange radiance. But when the caprice of the poet ended, this veil vanished, the radiance was eclipsed, and the woman turned again to common clay. ... To hear onebelieves herself really with Beatrice.

with that magic peculiar to D'Annunzio is, imagine, something like the experience of Eve when she heard the voice of the serpent in Paradise. D'Annunzio can make any woman feel that she is the centre of the

self praised I

universe.

^nly

in love

can

woman

icism and her narcissism;

harmoniously reconcile her erotwe have seen that these senti-

in such a manner that it is very difficult to adapt herself to her sexual destiny. To make herself a carnal object, the prey of another, is in contradic-

ments are opposed for a

woman

tion to her self- worship

:

it

seems to her that embraces

— Simone de Beauvoir

258

and sully her body or degrade her soul. Thus it some women take refuge in frigidity, thinking that

blight

that

is

in

way

they can preserve the integrity of the ego. Others and lofty sentiment. In one of Stekel's cases the patient was frigid with her respected and eminent husband and, after his death, with an equally superior man, a great musician, whom she sincerely loved. But in an almost casual encounter with a rough, brutal forester she found complete physical satisfaction, "a wild intoxication followed by indescribable disgust" when she thought of her lover. Stekel remarks that "for many women a descent into animality is the necessary condition for orgasm." Such women see in physical love a debasement incompatible with esteem and affection. But for other women, on the contrary, only the esteem, affection, and admiration of the man can eliminate the sense of abasement. They will not yield to a man unless woman must have a they believe they are deeply loved. considerable amount of cynicism, indifference, or pride to regard physical relations as an exchange of pleasure by which each partner benefits equally. As much as woman this

dissociate animal pleasure

A

and perhaps more

—man

revolts against

anyone who

at-

tempts to exploit him sexually; * but it is woman who generally feels that her partner is using her as an instrument. Nothing but high admiration can compensate for the humiliation of an act that she considers a defeat. We have seen that the act of love requires of woman profound self-abandonment; she bathes in a passive languor; with closed eyes, anonymous, lost, she feels as if borne by waves, swept away in a storm, shrouded in darkness: darkness of the flesh, of the womb, of the grave. Annihilated, she becomes one with the Whole, her ego is abolished. But when the man moves from her, she finds herself back on earth, on a bed, in the light; she again has a name, a face: she is one vanquished, prey, object. This is the moment when love becomes a necessity. As

when *

the child, after weaning, seeks the reassuring gaze of

Lawrence, for example, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, expresses through women who make a man an instrument of pleas-

Mellors his aversion for ure.

The its

parents, so

must a

woman

contemplation, that she

Whole from which her

is,

Woman

in

Love

259

through the man's loving after all, still at one with the feel,

now

painfully detached. She she has felt the orgasm, she is not set completely free from the spell of her flesh; her desire continues in the form of affection. In giving her pleasure, the man increases her attachment, he does not liberate her. As for him, he no longer desires her; but she will not pardon this momentary indifference unless he has dedicated to her a timeless and absolute emotion. Then the immanence of the moment is transcended; hot memories are no regret, but a treasured delight; ebbing pleasure becomes hope and promise; enjoyment is justified; woman can gloriously accept her sexuality because she transcends it; excitement, pleasure, desire are no longer a state, but a benefaction; her body is no longer an object: it is a hymn, is

seldom wholly

flesh is

satisfied

even

if

a flame.

Then she can yield with passion to the magic of eroticism; darkness becomes light; the loving woman can open her eyes, can look upon the man who loves her and whose gaze glorifies her; through him nothingness becomes fullness of being, and being is transmuted into worth; she no longer sinks in a sea of shadows, but is borne up on wings,

the skies. Abandon becomes sacred ecstasy. she receives her beloved, woman is dwelt in, visited, as was the Virgin by the Holy Ghost, as is the believer by the Host. This is what explains the obscene resemblance between pious hymns and erotic songs; it is not that mystical love always has a sexual character, but that the sexuality of the woman in love is tinged with mysticism. "My God, my adored one, my lord and master" the same words fall from the lips of the saint on her knees and the loving woman on her bed; the one offers her flesh to the thunderbolt of Christ, she stretches out her hands to receive the stigmata of the Cross, she calls for the burning presence of divine Love; the other, also, offers and awaits: thunderbolt, dart, arrow, are incarnated in the male sex organ. In both women there is the same dream, the childhood dream, the

exalted to

When

—

mystic dream, the dream of love: to attain supreme exist. ence through losing oneself in the other. .

.

19.Altruistic Love

Pitirim Sorokin

contemporaries have devoted as much thought and energy as has this distinguished Russian-American sociologist to the problem of how to use the power inherent in man's capacity to love to make human beings less

Few

insistent

and more creative. Prof. Sorokin, who directs the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism, said in a selfish

recent interview, "I came to the conclusion that if individual human beings, groups and cultural institutions in general did not become notably more creatively altruistic, noth-

Popular prescriptions, such as changes, religious changes, and education as a panacea against war, won't do it. This century, in which science and education have reached unrivalled heights, is the bloodiest of all the twenty-five centuries of Grecoing could save mankind.

political

Roman and European

history."

of Sorokin's central concepts, developed in Man and Society in Calamity, is his law of polarization "which runs contrary to the Freudian claim that calamity and

One

uniformly generate aggression, and contrary by Toynbee, that they lead uniformly to the moral and spiritual ennoblement of human beings." "What the law of polarization holds," Sorokin continues, "is that, depending upon the type of personality, frustrations and misfortunes may be reacted to and overcome by positive polarization, resulting either in an increased creative effort (consider the deafness of Beethoven, the blindness of Milton) or in altruistic transformation (consider St. Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola), or they may induce negative polarization in the shape of suicide, mental disorder, brutalization, increase of selfishfrustration

to the old claim, reiterated recently

Altruistic

Love

261

dumb

submissiveness, or cynical sensualism. This works both individually and collectively." Here Sorokin

ness,

surveys the "manifoldness" of love which lays the basis for the possibilities of altruism. From The Ways and Power of Love by Pitirim Sorokin, copyright 1954 by Beacon Press, Inc. By permission of

Beacon

Press, Inc.

Altruistic Love

Love is like an iceberg: only a small part of it is visible, and even this visible part is little known. Still less known is love's transempirical part, its religious and ontological forms. For the reasons subsequently given, love appears to be a universe inexhaustible qualitatively and quantitatively. Of its many forms of being, the following can be differentiated:

religious,

ontological, physical, biological,

ethical,

psychological, and social.

A. The Religious Aspect of Love

On

the religious plane love is identified with God, the highest value in the Christian and other great religions. "Love is God," and "God is love and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God and God in him," says the New Testament.^ So also say the Bhagavadgita, the Dhammapada, and the Scriptures of practically all the great religions: Taoism

and Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Jainism and Judaism, Mohammedanism, and the rest. Since God is believed to be the absolute value,. love participates in God's absolute value. Since

God

is

an

Infinite

Manifoldness love

and quantitative infinity. As such it cannot be defined by any words or concepts; at best these can be only symbolic indicators of the infinite cosmos of love.

is

also qualitative

Paul Tillich well expresses this infinity of love when he says: "I have given no definition of love. This is impossible, 1 1

John

4:7, 8,

16.

See:

St.

Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of et de Divino

God (Westminster, 1942); E. Swedenborg, De Divine Amove (New York, 1890).

Sapientia

262

Pitirim Sorokin

because there defined. It

structures in structures

is

no higher principle by which in

is life itself

in

its

actual unity.

it

could be

The forms and

which love embodies itself are the forms and which life overcomes its self-destructive

'

forces."

On this religious plane three conceptions of love have run throughout oriental and occidental religious, philosophical, and ethical thought: love as Eros, love as Agape, and love as a synthesis of Eros and Agape. Nygren's delineation of love as Eros and love as Agape serves as an introduction to the problem. He avers that love as Agape is fundamentally different from love as Eros; Agape form

that the

meant by

of love

Jesus, St. Paul,

Eros Eros

is

the

Eros

a desire of

good for

self. is

man's

effort to

ascend.

man's way to God. man's achievement, the endeavor of man to

Eros Eros

is

is

achieve salvation. Eros is egocentric love,

a form of self-assertion of the highest, noblest, and sublimest kind. Eros seeks to gain life divine, immortal.

Eros to

is

a will to have and

possess,

resting

sense of need. primarily is

Eros

love,

and

God

is

on a

human the ob-

given only to those deserve it; hence it is not spontaneous, but is

who 2

p. Tillich,

The

specifically Christian as

Christians.

Agape Agape is self-giving. Agape comes down from above (from God). Agape is God's way to man. Agape is a free gift, a salvation which is the work of Divine Love.

Agape

unselfish

is

love,

which "seeketh not its own," and freely spends itself.

Agape

lives

by God's

and

therefore

"lose

it."

Agape

dares

life,

to

and on God's own richness and freely

spends,

for

gives

it

rests

fullness.

Agape

own

ject of Eros.

Eros

is

and the early

is

primarily God's for God is

love,

Agape.

Agape evil

is poured out on "the and the good"; hence

Protestant Era (Chicago, 1948), p. 160.

Altruistic

"caused," by the value of the object. Eros recognizes value in object, and therefdre loves

it.

its

Love

263

spontaneous, "uncaused," and bestows itself on those who are worthy and not worthy of

it

is

it.

Agape

loves,

value in

its

and

creates

object.

Thus "Eros and Agape stand as direct opposites." Agape like the sun; it shines upon the sinful and the virtuous, redeeming the sinners no less than blessing the virtuous. is

inexhaustible richness spontaneously pours

itself out without any "rational discrimination." In this sense Agape is inscrutable, and incomprehensible by the human rational mind. Eros is love "earned" by the positive efforts of the loved party .^ It discriminates against the

Its

upon

all,

sinful.

Though the historical accuracy of this typology of Eros and Agape may be questionable in regard to Christianity and the oriental, Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian conceptions of love; and though several thinkers of the past and of the present give the terms Eros and Agape essentially different meanings,* the typology as such is graphic and logical. Some forms of love -are indeed nearer to the type of Eros, while others are nearer to that of Agape. We can, however, ask: can Eros be separated from Agape or are not these two aspects of love inseparable? Is not Agape the redeeming love, pouring itself out in its inexhaustible richness, especially on those who need it for their redemption, salvation, revival, and reintegration? Is not Agape this aspect of love which is "love for the sake of love"? If love were granted only to those who deserve it the virtuwould not such a love become a mere ous, the "elect" commercial prize-giving to the "good boys" for their good

—

—

3 A. Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1937), Vol. I. pp. 165, 171, et passim. * See among recent writers D. de Rougemont, L' Amour et I' Occident (Paris, 1939), translated into English by Montgomery Belgion under the title Passion and Society; Love in the Western World, American ed.; P. Rousselot, Pour I'Histoire du Probleme del' Amour au Moyen Age (Niiinster, 1908): M. C. D'Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love (London, 1947); The Bhagavadgita (New York, 1948), pp. 62 £E.; Sri S. Radhakrishnan, Aurobindo, The Life Divine (New York, 1949), pp. 187-189.

264

Pitirim Sorokin

behavior? These remarks show that the Agape form of love is inherent in the very nature of love, in its redeeming, resurrecting,

and all-forgiving functions. Such an Agape far

suum cuique tribuere, remuneration for service done. On the other hand, Agape in no way excludes Eros-Love. Eros-Love is nothing but falling in love vi^ith love and trying to be more perfect in love, with all the mental, moral, aesthetic, and physical ennoblement such a perfection implies. The ultimate point of such an Eros-Love is to reach transcends justice, in the sense of the as well as of a

the inexhaustibility of all-redeeming, all-loving, all-forgiv-

and all-ennobling Agape. A person's Eros-Love, reachbecomes God's Agape. This inseparability of Eros-Agape explains why factually most systems of love ing,

ing this level,

contain both these forms. If the transfiguration is possible only by the way of Nygren's Agape, then evidently one need not do anything; all efforts to achieve the goodness of love are of no avail; it may shine equally upon the virtuous and the sinful. If the transfiguration is possible only by the way of Nygren's Eros, then there is no need to pray for the grace of God or any super-individual power. Any love-seeker would become a sort of Prometheus who achieves his goal exclusively by

own efforts, regardless or even in spite of Zeus or any other force. In the oriental ^ as well as the occidental ethico-religious and philosophical conceptions, the prevailing view has been a combination of Eros and Agape as the way of salvation and achievement of love at its highest and best. Personal effort reinforced by the grace of God is considered the only real way to accomplish the purpose. "God helps those who strive, not those who rest and slumber," says St. Tychon." Either of these forms alone is insufficient by itself: without the grace of God or some super-individual power, man's efforts are inadequate. On the other hand, the love and justice of God are gladly granted those who his

^ is

•

In the Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita, "in Bhakti the grace of God to an extent; in prapatti it is freely bestowed"; S. Radhakrishnan,

earned

op. "

cit.,

p.

62.

G. P. Fedotov,

p. 229.

A

Treasury of Russian Spirituality

(New

York, 1948),

Altruistic

Love

265

earnestly labor for love and salvation. The thought and the practice of salvation in all '^reat religions are based

upon

this postulate.

Otherwise,

all

the calls to be good, to

perform good deeds, to fulfill moral and religious commandments would be senseless. Only a few minor streams of thought and practice, in the Orient and the Occident, * singled out exclusively either the Eros or the Agape way; and even these minor currents now and then had to grant to the other way a subsidiary '

role.

From this standpoint D'Arcy justifiably criticizes the onesidedness of Nygren's, Rousselot's, de Rougemont's, and other conceptions of Eros and Agape. He rightly says that "the two [forms of love] egocentric and theocentric have to live together," that "we must not think of the two loves separate and independent within the one self, even though, in order to bring out their distinct characteristics, we have to treat them as if they were alone." ^ "On the one side, there will be a man with a passion which seeks for deas

from "God, who respects man's

on the

liverance [of his real self

his pseudo-self]";

other,

integrity while lifting

up

new relation of love with himself." To sum up: properly understood, self-centered

an self

him

into a

effort of

and

to

man

love, as

and divine reach union with God, and God-centered love. to liberate in himself his real

"See for instance Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga (Calcutta, 1936) pp. The Life Divine, pp. 874, 892 f., 925 f. ff., et passim; See W. W. Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Oxford, 1939), Vol. 1, pp. 34-77, 122, 134-147, 160 fif., 204 ff., 235 ff., 265-282, et passim; also Vols. II and III, passim; S. Ranulf, The Jealousy of the Gods and Criminal Law at Athens (London-Copenhagen, 1933-34), Vol. I, pp. 32-42, 112, 148, et passim; P. Sorokin, Dynamics (New York, 1937-1941), t Vol. II, pp. 490 ff. » M. C. D'Arcy, The Mind and Heart of Love (London, 1947), pp. 255, 312, 320, et passim. Unfortunately all these authors, including even D'Arcy, make several mistakes in their interpretations of these forms of love and 12

*

of various (especially oriental) religions and philosophies from this standpoint. One of these mistakes is the tendency to view oriental philosophies and religions as the epitome of a dark, romantic, passionate Eros in which the ego or self or personality loses itself entirely in the mystic union with Brahma or nirvana and ends in a self-immolation. Such a conception is incorrect. As mentioned, oriental religions and philosophies contain in themselves both forms of love, Eros and Agape, some stressing the Eros type, others the Agape type, but almost always containing both. The same is true of Pythagoreanism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Manichaeanism, and medieval movements like Priscillianism and Catharism, described by de Rougemont as advocating only love as a dark passion irrational, ecstatic, selfeffacing, leading to self-destruction and self-immolation.

—

266

SoroWn

Pitirim

as divine grace helping

practically

all

though some Later on

we

man

in this

endeavor, are given in

true systems of love, oriental and occidental, systems stress the Agape, and others the Eros.

shall

meet

this

problem

in

its

empirical rami-

fications.

B.

The Ethical Aspect of Love

is identified with goodness itself. Love is viewed as the essence of goodness inseparable from truth and beauty. All three are unified aspects of the Absolute Value or God. Real goodness is always true and beautiful; pure truth is always good and beautiful; and genuine beauty is invariably true and good.

Ethically love

C. The Ontological Aspect of Love Ontologically love is, side by side with truth and beauty, one of the highest forms of a unifying, integrating, harmonizing, creative energy or power. Empedocles correctly noted the unifying creativity of love as the ontological es-

sence of this power. As such it is opposite to the functions of strife as "separating apart in enmity" what is united in and by love.^° In accordance with this, subsequent thinkers viewed even the unifying physical forces of gravitation, of the unification of electrons and protons in the atom, of chemical affinity, of magnetism, and so on, as the manifestation of love energy acting in the physical world; the "instincts" of sociality or gregariousness, biological mutual aid and cooperation, as the manifestation of love energy in the organic world; conscious love, sympathy, friendship, solidarity, as its manifestation in the psychosocial world. Everywhere in the inorganic, organic and psychosocial worlds the integrating and uniting role of love functions incessantly. Untiringly, it counteracts the dividing and separating forces of chaos and strife. Without the operation of love energy the physical, the biological, and the sociocul10 H. Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin. 1912), Vol. I, Emp>edodes, Fragment 17; Vol. II, pp. 1-2, 6-13. "In one movement all things coalesce into a unity in Love; in another they all separate in the enmity of Strife."

Altruistic

Love

267

cosmos would have fallen apart; no harmony, unity, or order would have been possible; universal disorder and enmity would have reigned supreme. As a creative energy of goodness, love unites what is separated, elevates what is base, purifies what is impure, ennobles what is ignoble, creates harmony in the world of enmity, peace in war. Love raises man as a biological organism to the level of divinity, infinitely enriches the human self, and empowers humanity with a mastery over the inorganic, organic, and sociocultural forces, up to the potential rescue of an individual and mankind from even biological death. Dostoievsky well expressed this ontological power, of love in his Brothers Kararnazoff. "Seeing the sins of men, one sometimes wonders whether one should react to them by force or by humble love. Always decide to fight them by humble love. If it is carried through, the whole world can be conquered. Loving humbleness is the most effective force, the most terrific, the most powerful, unequalled by any other force in the world." "^ All great apostles of love unanimously testify to this. Without love, neither the possession of the tongues of tural

gift of prophecy, nor a complete undermysteries and possession of all knowledge amount to anything, says St. Paul, and then magnificently describes the ethico-ontological nature of love:

angels,

nor the

standing of

Love

all

and

kind; love envieth not; not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things; Love never faileth: And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; suffereth long,

love vaunteth not

and the greatest of these

A yield

^ Sri

is

itself, is

is

love.^

person who becomes a real incarnation of love "wiU an influence greater than that of the sceptred mon-

See also Swami Vivekananda, Karma-Yoga (New York, 1945), pp. 10-12; Aurobindo, The Life Divine, passim.

^1

Corinthians 13:4-8, 13.

Pitirim Sorokin

268

arch," testifies Gandhi.^'' "Love is basically not an emotional but an ontological power, it is the essence of life itself, namely, the dynamic reunion of that which is separated": such is the recent reiteration of this ontological power of love."

Among

N. F. Fedorov (a little-known Russian notably influenced Dostoievsky and Leo Tolstoi), and under his influence V. Solovyev, have especially well developed and analyzed this ontological "energy" of love. They have shown that only through love, in cooperation with truth and beauty, can man rise from the level of a mortal biological organism to that of a conqueror of death

thinker

others,

who

and master of inorganic, organic, and sociocultural forces; that only in this way can man realize his truly divine nature and become "God-Man" (Bogotschelovek) that only thus can man fulfill his mission and redeem his historical exist;

ence; that only through such a real immortality are all the other values of humanity preserved, instead of becoming meaningless and perishing in vain.^ In this ontological conception, according to Solovyev,

love

is

the

power

that counteracts the dark evil that per-

meates the world of raw nature. Evil

is

a universal fact because each natural life beand hatred, continues in suffering and

gins with struggle

The first and ends in death and rottenness. law of nature is the struggle for existence. All the life of nature in the raw takes place in an incessant enmity of Every creature in this natural creatures and forces. world beginning with the smallest particle of dust and ending with man tells by its whole natural existence one and the same thing: "I am, and the rest of the world ex-

slavery

.

.

"

.

.

.

.

M. K. Gandhi, Self-Restraint versus Self-indulgence (Ahmedabad, 1928), p. 102. " P. Tillich, op. cit., xxv. 1^ See the cited works of St. Francis de Sales and E. Swedenborg. See also N. F. Fedorov, Filosofia ohschevo dela (The Philosophy of Common Cause) new edition (Kharbin, 1928-30); V. Solovyev, The Meaning of Love (English tr., London, 1945); especially Solovyev's Opravdanyie Dobra (Justification of Good) and Nravstvennya Osnovy Zhizni (The Spiritual Bases of Life) in his Works (Sobranyie Sotchinenyi) (St. Petersburg, 2nd ed., 1913), Vols. VIII and III. Fedorov evolved a comprehensive plan for a reconstruction of humanity in this direction, with the goal of conquering death as the greatest universal evil of humanity. See his work mentioned.

Altruistic

me

Love

269

mere means," and, colliding with you cannot exist, there is no room for you with me." Each creature in brute nature ists

only for

others,

it

as a

says: "If

I exist,

says so, each attempts to fight

and

all

the others, wants to de-

destroyed in turn by the others. In so far as it is based upon egoism, life in brute nature is evil life, and its law is the law of sin. By the same law sin inevitably causes its own retaliation, one evil calling forth another. For if one creature inimically acts against stroy them,

is

the others, these others act as inimically against

an enmity

is

—another form

suffering

it.

of the world

Such evil.

Since everything in nature sins one against another, everything suffers from one another. Owing to this egoism, which separates one creature from all the others, each creature is a stranger living in an inimical environment which presses and attacks it All its natural life consists in a strugfrom all sides. gle with this inimical environment, in self-defense against the rest of the world. But it cannot defend itself against the pressure of all these inimical forces a given creature is one while its enemies are many. They naturally overcome it. This conflict between each and all the rest inevitably leads to the destruction of each creature: the overwhelming inimical forces finally destroy its life, and the struggle ends universally by death and rotting. Death makes only explicit the secret brute of nature's .

.

.

:

life; it

shows that

life in

nature

is

a hidden death. Such

the fiery wheel of natural existence. Such

is the uniforms. Such is the tree of life in disintegrated nature: its root is sin, ^^ its growth is sickness, its fruit is death. is

versal evil, one in

its

nature and triple in

its

Love is the universal creative force that counteracts this Love replaces the struggle for existence by harmonious unity and mutual aid. It tends to make the whole universe one harmonious cosmos in which each particle is not

evil.

fighting

all

the others but harmoniously working with the By the power of love each creature is not

rest of the world.

opposed to 18

all

V. Solovyev,

the others,

The

is

not attacked by

all

the others,

Spiritual Bases of Life, Vol. Ill, pp. 35-52.

270

Pitirim Sorokin

and therefore is not destroyed by the others. For this reason its life need not be ended by death and destruction. Love tends thus to destroy the death itself and to replace it by eternal immortality."

So

far in the natural

ization of this creative

world we have only a partial realof love energy. Only through

work

does the world continue to exist in spite of the all-pervadLove keeps the world going and living. Love prevents the universal death and destrucit

ing destructive forces of evil. tion of the

whole universe.

more and more

—

If

and when love is realized and death are bound

fully, sin, suffering,

and with the full realization of love, to disappear. Such is the ontological role of love as the highest creative power.^* The foregoing gives one of the many variations of the ontological conception of love as the universal creative en-

to decrease

ergy.

D. The Physical Aspect of Love According to Solovyev and others, the physical counterpart of love in the inorganic world is shown in all physical forces that unite, integrate, and maintain the whole inorganic cosmos in endless unities, beginning with the smallest unity of the atom and ending with the whole physical universe as one unified, orderly cosmos.^ E.

The

The Biological Aspect of Love

biological counterpart of love energy manifests itself

and basic processes of life. This energy, known, and often called the "vital energy" that

in the very nature still

little

mysteriously unites various inorganic energies into a starunicellular or multicellular ortling unity of a living ganism, is the first biological manifestation of the Empedoclean energy of love. The generation of practically all

—

—

" Ibid., Vol. Ill, pp. 35-52. Somewhat similar ideas were expressed thirty years later by Sri Aurobindo in his The Life Divine. ^^ Ibid., Vol. Ill, p. 351. et passim. See also Solovyev's other works

some

men-

tioned and Fedorov, op. cit. i» See N. Wiener, Cybernetics (New York, 1948), where the universal form of "communication" is well analyzed.

Altruistic

unicellular organisms

from a parent

parent

four

cell either into

new

cell,

by

Love

271

fission of the

individuals (zoospores) or

into thirty-two or sixty-four microzooids with a subsequent

conjugation of gametes into a new organism, is another manifestation of "biological love energy": "the two are for a time bound together in an interactive association"; "the life of either one or the other is at some time dependent upon the potential or actual being of the other." Without such an interaction without the parent cell's supplying the vital tissues to the new organism, and without metabolic and physiological exchanges between parent and daughter cells the appearance of a new organism is impossible; the very continuity of life itself becomes impossible."* Co-operation of two organisms in sexual reproduction of multicellular organisms, accompanied by the passion of biological attraction between them, is a visible form of this "biological love" necessary for the maintenance of all such species and, through that, of life itself. The parental care of the offspring, during its period of helplessness the care

—

—

—

that in

—

some

species, like

Homo

sapiens,

must

last several

is a still more explicit manifestation of biological love energy. Without it such species would die out. This co-operation is rightly considered a "fundamental charac-

years

teristic of life trait

phenomena,"

as universal

of the "struggle for existence."

and basic

as the

^

The "co-operative forces are biologically the more important and vital [than the antagonizing forces]. The balance between the co-operative, altruistic tendencies and those which are disoperative and egoistic is relatively close [in biological organisms]. In the long run, however, the

Human

2f See Ashley Montagu, On Being (New York, 1950), for an excellent summary of various forms of co-operation and mutual aid as the basic biological processes. See also Ch. Nicolle, Biologie de I'invention (Paris, 1932), pp. 78 (f.; H. S. Jennings, The Beginning of Social Behavior in I'nicelhilar Organism (University of Pennsylvania, 1941). 21 See Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (London, 1902); W. C. Allee, Animal Aggregations (Chicago, 1931): The Social Life of Animals (New York, 1938); E. F. Darling, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle (Cambridge, 1938); A. E. Emerson, "The Biological Basis of Social Cooperation," Illinois Academy of Science Transactions, Vol. XXXIX, 1946; R. Gerard, •'Higher Level of Integration," in Biological Symposia, Vol. VIIl, 1942: R. (Chicago, 1945); S. Little, General Biology and Philosophy of Organism (New York, 1948); Charles Sherrington, S. J. Holmes, Life and Morals

Man

on His Nature (New York, 1941);

Sri

Aurobindo, The Life Divine.

272

Pitirim Sorokin

more altruistic drives are slightly stronger" a summary of this situation.^ To sum up: without the operation of a biological counterpart of love energy, life itself is not possible, nor its continuity, nor the preservation and survival of species, nor life evolution, nor the emergence and evolution of

group-centered,

—such Homo

is

sapiens,

F.

The Psychological Aspect of Love

Psychologically the experience of love is a complex consisting of emotional, afifective, volitional, and intellectual elements. It has many qualitative forms, covered by such terms as: empathy, sympathy, kindness, devotion, admiration, benevolence, reverence, respect, adoration, friendto single out a few. Each of these "shades" of love ship

—

as psychological experience has

its

own

"color."

experiences are opposite those of hatred, envy, jealousy, antipathy, and other forms genuine psychological experience of love, the loving individual tends to merge with

'^

These

enmity, dislike, of hate. In any the ego or I of

and

to identify

with the loved Thee. The greater the love, the greater the identification. The joy or sorrow of the loved person becomes joy and sorrow to the loving person. Genuine sharing of all the values of life follows. Sacrifice for the loved person becomes a sacrifice for the person himself. In other words, love as psychological experience is "altruistic" by its very nature; whereas the opposite experience of hatred is inherently selfish. In a genuine love the loved person is experienced always as the end value; in the egoistic experience the other person is always only the means value. Aristotle and V. Solovyev have pointed out very clearly this characteristic of love versus the egoistic experience of hatred and pseudo-love. In a real love or friendship a friend is "one who does what is good (or what he itself

22 W. C. Allee, "Where Angels Fear to Tread," Science, Vol. XCVII, 1943, pp. 518-25. See other considerations and facts in Ashley Montagu's and other cited works. 23 See M. Scheler, Das Wesen und die Formen der Sympathie (1929); N. Berdyaev, Solitude and Society (London, 1938), pp. 194 flf.; P. E. Johnson, Christian Love (New York, 1951). For other forma, see my Society, Culture, Personality, Chap. 5.

Altruistic

Love

273

and live for that friend's own one wishes his friend to sake," and not because the friend gives him pleasure or is useful to him. Pseudo-friendship, motivated by pleasure or utility, takes the other person as a means and not as the end value.^ Solovyev stressed this point especially well in his analysis of love and egoism. "True love is that which not only believes to be good) for another for that other's sake, .

.

.

afiirms in subjective feeling the unconditional significance

human

and in oneself, but also unconditional significance in actuality."^ Egoism in its pure form, on the contrary, "afl&rms an unconditional oppositeness, an unbridgeable chasm between one's own ego and the others. The egoist says: I am everywhile the others are just nothing for me and bething come something only as a mere means for me; my life and well-being is an absolute goal, while the life and well-being of others are admitted only insofar as they are instruments for a realization of my goal. ... I am the center, while ^ the whole worid is only a circumference." "Love is the justification and deliverance of individuality through the sacrifice of egoism. It rescues us from the inevitability of death, and fills our existence with an absolute Sacrificing egoism and surrendering ourselves content. to love, we find in it not merely living, but also life-giving power, and we do not forfeit our individuality (personality) with our egoism, but on the contrary make it eterof

.

individuality in another

this

justifies

.

.

.

.

.

nal."

Such a love cosmos is now only at its beginning in the empirical world of man, at about the same stage as is reason in the animal world. Love conquering death "exists in its beginning but not as yet in actual fact." Eventually it will 2*

grow and conquer death on

this planet, in this world.""

The Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. IX, 1166a; Bk. VIII, 1156a; "On Friendship," Everyman's Library Edition, p. 179, et passim. V. Solovyev, The Meaning of Love (London, 1945), pp. 21, 44, et pasAristotle,

Cicero, 25

sim. 2«

V. Solovyev, Justification of Good, Vol. VIII, p. 99; Berdyaev, op.

Chap.

cit..

4.

v. Solovyev, The Meaning of Love, pp. 22, 44, 53, 59, et passim. "Without love there is no self-fulfilment of personality," N. Berdyaev, op. cit., p. 195. See a development of these ideas in Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine, pp. 187 ff., 874, et passim. 27

274

Pitirim Sorokin

More

concretely, love

individual loneliness;

is

fills

the experience that annuls our

the emptiness of our isolation

with the richest value; breaks and transcends the narrow walls of our little egos; makes us coparticipants in the highest life of humanity and in the whole cosmos; expands our true individuality to the immeasurable boundaries of the universe.

Eliminating our loneliness and binding us by the noblest of bonds to others, love is literally a life-giving force, because, as the studies of suicide show, an empty loneliness is

main cause of suicide, and because altruists live longer than egoists do."^ Making us full-fledged coparticipants in the lives of others, love infinitely enriches our lives by the greatest and noblest values of all humanity. In this sense it fills us with knowledge, because coparticipation and coexperience in the richest experience of all the generations of humanity rather than only in one's pitifully poor individual experience is the most efficient method of learning and the most fruitful way to truth and knowledge. In this sense the love experience leads to a true cognition and the

—

—

love becomes truth (see further on that). Love beautifies our life because the love experience

is

very nature and beautifies the whole universe. To love anything or anybody means literally to immortalize the mortal, to ennoble the ignoble, to uplift the low, to beautify the ugly. Anything that one looks at beautiful

by

its

through loving eyes becomes "lovely," that is, beautiful. By its very nature love is goodness itself; therefore makes our life noble and good. Finally, love experience

means freedom

at

its

it

loftiest.

love anything is to act freely, without compulsion or coercion. And vice versa: to be free means to do what one loves to do. In this sense, love and true freedom are syno-

To

is the loftiest form of freedom. Compulsion and coercion are the negation of love. Where there is love there is no coercion; where there is coercion there is no love. And person who the greater the love the greater the freedom.

nyms; love

A

» See the data and literature in P. Sorokin, Society, Culture, and Personality (New York, 1947), p. 8 ff.; also P. Sorokin, Altruistic Love: A Study of American "Good Neighbors" and Christian Saints (Boston, 1950).

Altruistic

Love

275

humanity is free in this human universe; a person who loves the whole universe is free in the whole world. A person who hates the world is the greatest of slaves subjectively and objectively. Anything or anybody is his enemy, anything or anybody hinders him, opposes him, presses upon him, limits his freedom incessantly, at every loves

all

—

turn, in every action, in every thought, emotion, or volition.

The whole world, from inanimate men, becomes tioners."* St.

objects

his prison filled with

up

to his fellow

innumerable execu-

Paul's quoted statements are perfectly accu-

Freedom is love and love is freedom. is marked further by a "feeling" of fearlessness and power. Love does not fear anything or anybody. It cuts off the very roots of fear. Where there is fear rate in this respect.

The

there

love experience

is

no

love;

where there

is

love there

is

no

fear.

God

through fear are the lowest of human beings. They worship God from fear of punishment. ... So long as there is any fear in the heart, how can there be love also? Love conquers naturally all fear. A loving mother does not hesitate to throw herself against any danger menacing her child; a loving person does not hesisavtate to lay down his life is not afraid even of death ing the loved ones. Fear comes from a selfish idea of cut•'Those that love

—

—

from the universe. The smaller and the more selfish I make myself, the more is my fear." The best and most scientific remedy for fear is love. Without love there is no remedy for this disease. ting one's self off

'^^

A

The fearlessness and freedom of love implies power. person who is not afraid of anything is subjectively (in his own experience) and objectively a powerful person. He cannot be intimidated; cannot be bribed; he cannot be beaten into subjection. All his energies are coiled up into the single power of love "that beareth all things, endureth all things." Nothing in this coiled-up energy is wasted in inner and external friction; the whole of it is directed one great purpose. And often the more it functions, the

conflicts to

greater are the returns of the energies 2»

See E. Swedenborg, op.

cit.,

pp. 96

S..',

it

Swami Vivekananda, Karma-

Yoga, pp. 10-13 »=

Swaml Vivekananda, Bhakti-Yoga, pp.

generates in others;

88-89.

276 the

Pitirim Sorokin

more

expends itself, the greater are the returns that reexpenditure. In this sense it is a form of energy almost inexhaustible (like the energy of intra-atomic

plenish that

is

it

its

an energy that sometimes actually grows through The more love expends itself the stronger it becomes. Herein lies the fact, noted above, of the majestic, gigantic power of love and gentleness, of the power of the great incarnations of love like Buddha and Jesus, St. Francis and Gandhi. Even from a strictly "positivistic" friction), its

expenditure.

standpoint, the influence exerted

upon the whole of human

by these

apostles of love

history far exceeds the influence

of the mighty

conquerors, rulers, empire builders, and seeming controllers of millions of soldiers and subjects. Hence a scientific prescription. The most effective and most .

accessible

power

is

way

to acquire

to love truly

and

apostles of love prove to by hate and coercion,^

the

maximum

.

.

of constructive

The kingdoms built by the be more enduring than those built wisely.

Finally, the love experience is equivalent to the highest peace of mind and happiness. Beginning with the somewhat puny "peace of mind" of Freudians and of our best sellers on "how to stop worrying," and the lollipop happiness of our dime-store hedonists and chamber-of-commerce utilitarians; passing through the short-lived "peace of mind" and "happiness" of contemporary sensual lovers; and ending with the unshakable peace of mind and unutterable bliss of an all-embracing, all-forgiving love: the love experience is the only experience that brings both of these graces of God peace of mind and happiness to their fruition. When love is slight and impure, peace and happiness are

—

—

slight

and

peace of ness 31

fragile. When it is unbounded and pure, it God which passeth all understanding"; ^^

becomes the

See,

on the

life

ineffable

"the happi-

is

summum bonum.

span and longevity of various

social

organizations

business empires, political parties, educational institutions, re(states, ligious organizations, and so on), my Society, Culture, and Personality, Chaps. 34 and 47. Whereas the average duration of business empires is about 28 years, and of empires built hastily through conquest is from a few years to a few centuries, the great religious organizations are the most iong-livcd of practically all social groups and cultural systems. They have already been living for one or several millennia. ^'^ Philippians 4:7. "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it 1m; afraid" John 14:27.

—

.

Altruistic

"Love for

Love

277

the highest happiness." ^ Withneither peace of mind nor any sort of

love's sake

is

out love there is happiness. Hence, the best and most accessible path to real peace of mind and supreme happiness is to love (wisely guided by truth). Such are some of the important characteristics of love as psychological experience. In comparison with these, other psychological traits of the love experience are somewhat insignificant and puny. . .

G. The Social Aspect of Love a meaningful intertwo or more persons where the aspirations and aims of one person are shared and helped in their realization by other persons. A loving

— on

Finally,

action

or

the social plane love

relationship

—between

is

person not only does not hinder the realization of the wise aims of the loved person but positively helps it. So far as he helps, he does not cause pain or sorrow to the loved person, but increases his happiness. It is the joy of giving

and the joy of receiving; it is fulfilling oneself in others and by others. The terms "solidarity," "mutual aid," "co-operation," "unity of good neighbors," "familistic relationship," and the like denote various forms of love as social relationship. Its highest forms are magnificently defined in the Sermon on the Mount.

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you. Agree with thine adversary quickly. First be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and

to

offer thy gift [to the altar].

«3 Swami Vivekananda. Bhakti-Yoga, p. 104. The ordinary joy of love is by what St. Tychon's companion (Chebotarev) says of him: "On the days when St. Tychon had received the greatest number of poor and distributed the greatest amount of money and other alms, he appeared especially cheerful and joyous. But on the days when he had been solicited only by a few or none at all, he would be sad and depressed. ... He was the eye of the blind and the feet of the lame. His. doors were like Job always open to beggars and wanderers (and even criminals), who found food, drink, and rest under his roof." G. P. Fedotov, op. cit., p. 199.

illustrated

—

M. C. D'Arcy

278

heard that it hath been said, An eye for an and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil but whosover shall smite thee on thy right

Ye have

eye,

:

cheek, turn to

And

if

thy coat,

any let

him

man

the other also. will sue thee at the law,

him have thy cloak

And whosoever

shall

and take away

also.

compel thee to go a mile, go

with him twain.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. These norms outline the social relationships of love and best.

at

their highest

The

religious,

ethical,

ontological, physical, biological,

psychological, and social phases of love do not exhaust

on the contrary, they show the

infinite richness

it;

of this par-

ticipant in the Absolute.

We

mainly on the psychoand sociocultural planes of love love as a "visible" empirical psychosocial phenomenon. Concentrating on these planes, however, we shall always keep in mind the shall concentrate in this study

logical

—

manifoldness of love as a whole, because without its religious, ethical, and ontological aspects we cannot truly understand a "visible" part of this cosmos, its psychosocial empirical aspects.

20. Preface to

M.

"The Mind and Heart

of

Love"

C. D'Arcy

Because the motifs of its argument are stated by several rich voices voices together and in counterpart like a fugue

— —

medieval and modem thought making it impossible to excerpt or summarize, and because of its brilliance as a piece of writing, we are including here the

from

classical,

Preface,

The Mind and Heart of Love

279

Preface to a book which has been called "a great contribution to a noble theme." The theme, of course, is the experience of love as the meaning of human existence; and those readers who wish to pursue the issue of ontology

must go

to the source.

Coming out

of the comprehensive tradition of Christhis study in Eros and Agape analyzes the seeming conflict between the Lion of self-centered love and the Unicorn of self-sacrifice. Within the framework tian

humanism,

of a law of giving and taking wherein "something seems to away into nothingness itself while being at the same

slide

time the provider of what is to come," Father D'Arcy attempts a reconciliation by seeking the source of human passion in the completeness of divine love. Martin Cyril D'Arcy, educated at Oxford University and the Gregorian University in Rome, has been a Jesuit since 1931 and is a former Master of Campion Hall at Oxford. He is the author of The Nature of Belief, Mirage and Truth, Pain and the Providence of God and other works. From The Mind and Heart of Love by M. C. D'Arcy, copyright 1947 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. By permission of the publishers.

Preface to

"The Mind and Heart

One of the wisest teachers Cook Wilson, used to cut

of

Love"

of philosophy I ever knew, John short the speculations of his pu-

on the nature of knowledge by drily remarking: "You must already know what knowing is, for otherwise you would not be seeking to know what it is; and besides you cannot get outside it in order to criticise it." We do not, perhaps, need love in order to study the nature of love, but we must from experience know so well what love is that it may seem idle to ask questions about it. That does not stop people, however, from asking questions, and the more

pils

questions are asked the

more

difficult

does

maze

it

become

to

the questions reveal. Every lover will tell us that his love is unique; he will listen with impatience to explanations and repeat the old

find a thread to lead us out of the

280

M. C. D'Arcy Da amantem et

sentit quod dico; only another lover, with love like mine, can understand. But as a special quality in all loving need not interfere with there also being something common, I will by-pass this difficulty. It is hard enough to find something common in the variety of descriptions which have been given of it in memoirs, stories, lyrics, and epics. Love appears in all literature, not as a passing episode, but as the marrow of it. But with what a

cry:

bewildering variety of incident and type! We have to take into consideration not only maternal love but the love of the child for its parents, not only the awakening desires of adolescence but the binding affection of a David and Jonathan. Dante's emotions on seeing Beatrice are not the same as the love of Romeo for Juliet or of Tristram for Isolde or Othello for Desdemona. Penelope and Cordelia are both constant, but their love is not alike. The ancients, taking friendship as the natural expression of affection, made a triple division of love. They based this division on the presence or absence of the motive of self-interest. The lowest form was, therefore, selfish; above this came the love which is pure enjoyment, and highest of all was the love of another for his or her own sake. On the same basis they made, also, the still more straightforward distinction of the loves of concupiscence and benevolence. These divisions have lasted down the ages, but they have to some extent been ousted by distinctions drawn from psychological and psychoanalytical theories of the impulses and the sentiments. Christianity has made a special contribution by its doctrine of charity, the new and startling doctrine, that is to say, of God's manner of loving man and man's graced response to that love. No account of the nature of love can afford to leave this out, because it has had a transforming effect on civilization and added a new dimension to our conception of love. The power and novelty of Christian "charity" are best illustrated in the two well-known passages from St. Paul, the one from the letter to the Romans, where St. Paul asks: "Who shall and the second separate us from the love of Christ?" from the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians: "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and

—

The Mind and Heart of Love

Preface,

have not charity, tinkling cymbal.

I

am become Of

as

281

sounding brass, or a

I hope to what is to follow. To mention now only two authors whose views I outline and criticise in this book, namely. Penis de Rougemont and Anders Nygren, no one can fail to see what a singular and decisive .

.

."

the transforming effect

give plenty of evidence in

importance they attribute to Christian charity, or, as they it. Agape. There are, therefore, many kinds of love, so many, in fact, that any attempt to link them together may seem to be doomed to failure. Let me explain, therefore, how it is I have come to write this book. Like everybody else, I suppose, I took for granted when I was young that in love was to be found all that was most excellent, and as I had the good fortune to be brought up in the belief that a God, call

who was

infinitely loving, existed, I had, as I

the easiest and happiest

way

still

believe,

of approaching the subject.

But soon problems began to multiply, fascinating problems which will occupy thinkers, as well as lovers, to the end of time, and of some of these problems the chapters to follow will treat. But one of the failings of the human mind is to jump to conclusions too quickly, and to make a pattern with insufficient data. Love does not change its face, but it has many expressions, and a lack of experience and too happy a lot led me to interpret it without some of its lines and without its shadows. Discovery depends so much on our having a trained eye and a mature vision, on our being enlightened by our own experience to notice what is there before us. Pieces of evidence and decisive clues are missed through lack of attention, or because the hunt, so to speak, is not up in our own souls. I knew, for instance, when young the stories of Eros and Psyche, of Dante and Beatrice and Tristram and Isolde; they had a secret which stirred more than the imagination, and they were clearly symbols and pointers as much as they were stories; but their bearing on the problems which exercised me was hidden for a long time. What is true of stories holds equally with pregnant sayings. No one can read without a stir of the heart such sayings as: "Our heart is uneasy until it shall rest in Thee"; "I sought what I might love, in love with

282

M. C. D'Arcy

loving,

and safety

"Tu ne me

I hated, and a way' without snares"; chercherais pas, si tu ne me possedais"; or

even: "for each man kills the thing he loves." But having read them and been stirred, we can pass on quite blind to their possible interconnection. But when the hunt is up

and the quarry is in sight, the most unsuspected pieces of evidence leap to the eye. Aristotle, for example, when he is writing on physics or metaphysics, is as dry and remote as a mathematician, and yet, as the idea I now hold about love grew in my mind and spread out, of all unlikely places the chapters of Aristotle on the coming to be and passing away of organic life took on a new colour. They had become no longer remote, but relevant. In the development of the ideas in this book the passages from Aristotle are, then, a landmark. Of books read there are neariy always a few which stand out as landmarks; or rather, when one is in process of producing an idea of one's own, they deserve to be called midwives. So great an effect, indeed, do such books have, that it is difficult at times to be sure what is one's own and what is borrowed from them. What they say has been so assimilated that it seems to be personal

and

original.

Among

such books I will mention those which have most me to agreement or disagreement. The earliest in time is Pierre Roussek)t's Probleme de V Amour au Moyen Age. Rousselot claimed to have discovered a divergence of view about the nature of love among the Scholastics who preceded St. Thomas Aquinas. His discovery has been declared to be a mare's nest by Gilson and other unfriendly critics. It is not my intention to defend Rousselot. But even granted that he was wrong in his main contention, he nevertheless presented a problem which is in no sense imaginary. He did show that it is possible to have a conflict of loves, and that, in fact, there are two tendencies which are not easily reconciled. The first is serene and poised; the second ecstatic and poignant. The first explains adeinfluenced

quately why it is so natural to love oneself and seek one's own happiness and perfection. But as it is so naturally selfcentred, it does not explain so easily how a man can love another, even

God, more than

himself.

The second kind

Preface,

The Mind and Heart of Love

283

of love, with its emphasis on self-sacrifice, did explain the love of one's neighbour and of God and the contempt of self; but it in its turn seemed inadequate to justify selfperfection as an end. Now, as so often happens, reflection on this problem was excited by another book which seemed to dovetail into that of Rousselot. Anders Nygren had written three

volumes on Eros and Agape, and he, too, held that there were two kinds of love, the one egocentric and the other theocentric. His thesis ran counter to that of Rousselot in that he wished to sweep away all vestiges of Greek and Scholastic thought on love from the Christian idea of Agape. He maintained that self-centred love had crept into Christian thinking, been baptized by St. Augustine and as a result had contaminated medieval thought. Criticism of both these authors brought me near to a personal view, which I thought could avoid the weaknesses of both these authors and be far more embracing. It would fit the dance of the atoms and the to-and-fro movement in the inanimate world; it would give meaning to much that was obscure in the relations of animal love and in the evidence from human pathological cases. In the discussion of this view with others I was told that what I said about self-sacrifice and death would find corroboration in what Freud had written on the death-instinct. As, however, I was anxious to keep my thought my own on this delicate matter and could truthfully say that my memory of Freud's view was too dim for it to influence me, I did not look up what he had written until I had completed my own thought. Much more germane to my theme was a book, written by a friend of mine, Hunter Guthrie, and called Introduction au Probleme de VHistoire de la Philosophie, which good fortune, again, put into my hands just at the right time. The title of this book is too general to give a proper idea of its contents. What Hunter Guthrie sets out to do is to overhaul the meaning of a human person as a thinking and willing being. To do this he employs what is known as the phenomenological method. That is to say, he tries to go behind the variety of human experience, determined in part as it is by heredity and education, and detect the

M.

284

C. D'Arcy

faint pulsations of

our

common humanity

as expressed in

examining "the thinker in his purely a priori condition." Like others who use this phenomenological method he brings into play the terms, existence and essence. (Those who have read Kierkegaard, even if they are not well acquainted with metaphysics, will remember the importance that writer attached to the term "existence.") Now those who study philosophy have to learn much about this distinction between essence and existence, but it was not till I had read Hunter Guthrie's

and thought. This he

will

book

that

I

saw the

calls

full significance of these distinctions in

So once again a chance reading of a book enabled me to string together what had hitherto been unconnected in my mind. Lastly and quite recently I came across Passion and So-

relation to the different sorts of love.

by Montgomery Belgion of L' Amour et I'Occident by Denis de Rougemont. I knew of the wayward conception of love entertained by the troubadours in the early Middle Ages through reading the important work

ciety, a translation

S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love; but it was not began reading Passion and Society, which dealt with the same subject, that I caught the connection between this romantic love and what I had discovered in psychology and metaphysics. And so it has come about that various authors, writing on very disparate subjects, Rousselot on a spiritual and moral problem, Nygren on religion, Aristotle on the nature of change. Hunter Guthrie on metaphysics, and Denis de Rougemont on Provengal poetry and troubadour love, shuffled the thoughts in my mind and helped to form them into a pattern. In the following pages I will move through these authors and their views to the conclusions which I wish to establish.

of Mr. C. till

I

Love

is

such a vast subject offering so

many

temptations

new and

beguiling turns and twists of it that a writer would never reach an end if he did not make up his mind to concentrate on one aspect of it. In connecting to delay over

up one great

historical manifestation with a great philo-

sophical tradition and by contrasting what some have called the Greek approach by Eros with the Christian approach

by Agape,

I

hope to make a pattern which may convince

Preface,

The Mind and Heart of Love

285

and serve, if examined, to connect together traits which I have not time to mention. If the word love be used not too loosely I believe that some all-embracing conceptions can be adopted, though when the branches have to be examined in detail, each will need a volume of explanation. Think for a moment of all the strange varieties of love we come across in human conduct, and what a Hmitless expanse any anthology of love opens up to us. I have been glancing at favourite lines of verse: "Odi et amo," "As Lines so Loves oblique may well Themselves in every Angle greet: But ours so truly parallel. Though infinite can never meet," "Out upon it I have loved three whole days together. And am like to love three more, if it prove fair weather," "A well tamed Heart, For whose more noble smart Love may be long choosing a dart." These and countless other passages need a long commentary. The reader, as it is, will find quite enough commentary in what is to follow and as much philosophy as he will be able to stomach. For fear, however, lest in the method which I intend to follow, the thread of the argument be lost, I will put down here a summary, which must, alas, be as deceptive as it may appear simple. To some the simplicity may suggest that I have in mind some kind of hybrid or counterfeit philosophy which uses metaphors and poetic expressions when hard and rigorous analysis is required. Truly there is a way of speaking and writing on deep subjects which can appeal to undisciplined minds but to those who want truth is only exasperating. It gains its effect by ambiguous words and by the use of emotional instead of logical associations. I can only defend myself at the moment by saying that I am fully aware of the danger, and if in this summary I appear to suggest, for instance, that the changes in the physical world can be described in terms of desire and love, or that all desire, as it occurs in the lower orders of living beings, is equivalent in any way to what we know as human love, I beg the reader to wait on what is

to come for a proper explanation. The simplest statement of the law which governs what

highest and lowest in the Universe can be called that of "Give and Take." In the most elementary changes in the is

286

M.

C. D'Arcy

physical world there is gain and loss, the taking on of something and the passing on of what once was and no longer is. Aristotle describes such change in terms of mat-

and form, where there is always something determinable which is made determined and something which actively determines, and gives it form. Something seems to slide away into nothingness itself while being at the same time a provider of what is to come, and something enters into poster

session. This principle

is

seen

more

clearly in the continu-

There is always a duality, of which one aspect is negative as compared with the other: one gives and the other takes. The giving is a surrender and implies a certain passivity, perhaps even unto death and extinction. The desire which is felt by the two parties in this momentary or prolonged union accords with the role played. There is the whoop of triumph, the exultant mastery in the act of possession and on the other side there is a joy in self-surrender even to absorption and total extinction in the being of the other. It may be that this latter desire or emotion is due to a primary urge for the species and its continuation, and since there is in the lower forms of life no true indiation of

life.

viduality in either participant, there

the

owner of the

instinct

is

from rushing

nothing to prevent in joy to

its

death.

The important point to notice is the universal fact of duality. What we meet in the animal world and in human beits analogies in art and literature and science. Science deals with the positive and negative energy and inertia; art with major and minor chords, the rise and fall of the accent and the limiting and controlling power on matter of the form, which Coventry Patmore called "creation's crowning good, wall of infinitude." So ubiquitous, indeed, is this phenomenon of duality that it has found expression even in philosophy, in all those systems which go by the name of "dialectic." The universality of this "dialectic" must not, however, be exaggerated. On closer examination important differences between what are superficially alike usually reveal themselves, and it is all important to emphasize the unique status of man. In so far as he is kin to the animals we can

ings has

Preface,

The Mind and Heart of Love

287

boldly point to analogies between them, but human love has something which animal love never has. The difference can be best expressed in saying that the higher actions of

man have an

and that

intrinsic value

man

has a personal

dignity. This dignity implies a radical difference

human

love and any lower form of love.

the brutal possessiveness which

It

marks the

between

forbids alike

positive,

male

surge of animal passion and the total self-yielding of feminine ecstasy. In creatures which are swayed by animal passion the male instinct is to dominate and take, the fe-

male

to yield

and

give.

They

are unhindered

considerations, by mutual respect.

by any moral

that they should get what they want and that the species should be continued. In taking, therefore, and giving they fulfil and it does not matter whether the lion or their nature the lioness, the actual male or female of the species, lord it so long as the two distinct and complementary loves are present in one way or another. Both are needed and together they suffice, the feminine as the love which surrenders for the sake of the other or the continuation of the It is sufficient

—

species,

and the male as the love which seeks its own and whether it be rampant or, as we shall see later,

possesses, cognitive.

Now, whereas

in nature these instincts

go their

on the human the taking and giving and each

careless often of individual

life,

own way, level

each

must grow in is a sacred life which must be respected. A new cycle begins; the two loves are present and are sublimated if the lower passion is lifted up, as it should be, to the ends of spirit. Every human person has these two loves within him, with one self

usually predominant, but the sacrificial impulse has a new direction. The contrast between animal and human love is admirably described in the lines of Donne:

All other things to their destruction draw.

Only our love hath no decay; This no to-morrow hath nor yesterday, Running it never runs from us away, But truly keeps his first, last, everlasting day.

M.

288

C. D'Arcy

is more than a human love and that say that the sacrificial love has a new direction. In the equality which should exist in true human love it has not its full outlet; there is more to it than a mere equality, for it is now the expression of the secret mark of human

But within the soul

is

why

beings,

I

namely

their

creatureliness,

the frail-as-gossamer

hold on our nature, which we call existence or persistence in being. We are hangers on, courtiers of the Absolute; we can be unmade as qUickly as we are made, and in that dependence is felt dimly the ultimate love of the rivulet for its source. That is why in the mystics' terminology the soul

is

enraptured and

its life is

stolen away,

and

it

is

in

the dark night that the total denuding of self is accomplished. But whereas the primitive impulse was to loss of self, "for I was flax and he was flames of fire," in that region where the self meets the Lord of life, there is communion and not death; "My very ashes in their urn, shall, like a hallowed Lamp, for ever burn." Finally, this law of the two in one, of giving and taking, is to be found in its primordial and perfect expression in God himself, where in the mutual love of the Trinity all is given without loss, and all is taken without change, save that a new Person is

revealed in this wondrous intercommunion

Who

is

Love

itself.

The method I have used may be compared to a fugue, where by fugue is meant the more or less exact reproduction by several voices of the statement of a leading part. If love be composed of two leitmotifs in the way I suggest, the evidence for this hypothesis must be sought in more than one sphere of human activity, and even further afield in the behaviour of other creatures. Each new piece of evidence will repeat the main theme in its own way and make it emerge more clearly, and that is why I have not scrupled to appeal to poets and modern psychologists as well as to philosophers and theologians. The different voices coming in one after another will, I hope, leave the reader at the end with the conviction that the main theme is true. The method involves many repetitions, and if the reader finds these boron one condition, however, ing I beg him to skip them

—

Preface, that he

ment.

I

The Mind and Heart of Love

289

sure that he has grasped the tenor of the arguhave tried to keep the argument Hght by avoiding,

is

who have been may complain belong to any known

so far as possible, technical terms. Those

trained in a certain school of scholarship

what I have written does not genre of scholarly work. I cannot see that this matters so long as the truth is made manifest. The "wissenschaftliche" that

can become a burden instead of a gain, for the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. Towards the end of the book, however, I have been forced, in order to give a solid foundation to my view, to have redistinctions

course to metaphysics.

The reader untrained

may

in the abstrac-

hope have already grasped the general argument of the book by the time he reaches these chapters, the omis-

tions of philosophy

find this hard going, but as I

that he will

sion of

them

will not

be so serious as in other types of

books written on a different method. The advantage of a cumulative argument is that some items in it can be neglected without total loss, however much the artistic unity of the whole may suffer. While writing this book I got my friend, Patrick Pollen, to do a coloured drawing for me, which seemed to contain in it almost everything I wanted to say. My hope was to have it for a frontispiece, but unfortunately that has not proved possible. I mention the drawing because it will explain, what otherwise might seem mysterious, the many' references to the Lion and the Unicom. My original title for this book was the Lion and the Unicom, and the drawing showed these two heraldic beasts supporting, as in the royal arms, a shield shaped like a heart. The Lion symbolizes that noble and ignoble love which is leonine and lordly and asserts itself in pride and self-respect and honour. In other words it stands for self-centred love. The Unicorn, on the other hand, is suited for the Anima. In most of the legends the

Unicom

is

a fierce beast,

but Christianity

fawn which pants for the waters of life and is ready for self-sacrifice. With this clue I hope that the symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn wiU be clear.

has

made

it

gentle and likened

it

to the

290

Reinhold Niebuhr

many books which have been written on human and divine love, I refer to only a few. The omission of names must not be taken to imply that I think slightingly of their treatment of the subject. It is true that I have not used what they have written, but the reason is that I deemed Of

it

the

wiser to decline their help rather than risk being disfrom my own line of thought.

tracted

21.

Love as a Possibility for the Individual

Reinhold Niebuhr

As a pastor and a writer, Dr. Niebuhr has passionately summoned religionists to extend the range of social obligation Here he concerned with the conflict between human limitations and the ideal of unlimited love; affirming the necessity of uncoerced protection, interest and tenderness for others without which political, economic and social justice cannot be guaranteed. Not imposed reason but the natural force of love transmuted by religious tension into moral will makes this ascendance possible for the essentially finite and willful individual. Reinhold Niebuhr is vice-president of the faculty of Union Theological Seminary where he is Professor of Christian Ethics and Philosophy of Religion. Acknowledged to be one of the most penetrating social critics and perhaps the most influential contemporary theologian, he is the author of Moral Man and Immoral Society, The Nature and Destiny of Man, The Self and the Dramas of History and other books. From An Interpretation of Christian Ethics by Reinhold Niebuhr, copyright 1935 by Harper & Brothers. By permission of Harper & Brothers.

to the ultimate reach of the Christian conscience. is

Love as a Possibility for the Individual

No

system of justice established by the political, economic, social coercion in the political order is perfect enough to dispense with the refinements which voluntary and uncoerced human kindness and tenderness between individuals add to it. These refinements are not only necessary, but possible. If the error of the medieval system of politics was to take traditional equilibria of justice for granted without

and

seeking to perfect their basic structure, its virtue was to seek the refinement of this justice by the love of individuals. In spite of the hypocrisies of the traditional medieval "lady bountiful" a genuine humaneness developed within and

which bourgeois sodevotion to the ideals of justice and love, has never achieved. The most grievous mistake of Marxism is its assumption that an adequate above the

injustices of feudal society

ciety, in spite of its sentimental

mechanism of

who

social justice will inevitably 'create individ-

be disciplined enough to "give according to their ability and take according to their need." The highest achievements of social good will and human kindness can be guaranteed by no political system. They are the consequence of moral and religious disciplines which might be more appreciated in our day if the Christian Church had not mistakenly tried to substitute them for the coercive preuals

will

requisites of basic justice.

What

is'necessary in this respect

is

also possible.

The

life

of the individual stands in an ascending scale of freedom and therefore under an ascending scale of moral possibilities. An individual who lives in New York does not have the freedom, and therefore lacks the possibility, of relating

terms of intimate contact and brotherly obligation Tokyo. He is even restrained from that kind of relationship with many people in his own city and his own nation. But there are always areas in which he is free to transcend the mechanisms and the limitations in which all life is involved and to relate his life to other Ufe his life in

to an individual in

292

Reinhold Niebuhr

terms of voluntary and free cooperation. It must, of course, be remembered that he is not free to transcend the total system of nature in which he stands which sets his life in competition with other life. The command to love his neighbor as himself must, therefore, remain an impossibility as well as a possibility. The ultimate reach of the ideal into the realm of the impossible does not, however, restrict the possibilities. On the contrary, it establishes a dimension in which every achievement of human brotherhood suggests both higher and broader possibilities.

in

A moral discipline calculated to increase the intensity and range of man's obligation to other

life

involves two factors:

the extension of the area in which life feels itself obligated to affirm and protect the interest of other life and the provision of an adequate

dynamic

to support this obligation.

Corresponding to these two factors there are two resources in human nature to which this religio-moral discipline must be related: The natural endowments of sympathy, paternal and filial affection, gregarious impulses and the sense of organic cohesion which all human beings possess, and the faculties of reason which tend to extend the range of these impulses beyond the limits set by nature. Unfortunately, the moral systems which have sought to extend the rational range of social obligation have been deficient in dealing with the problem of social and moral dynamics, while the systems which have dealt with the latter have usually neglected to deal adequately with the rational contribution to

On the one side Stole, Kantian, and utilitarian rationalism have neglected or obscured the problem of moral dynamics, while on the other side Romanticism and many morality.

schools of Christian thought have failed to do justice to the contribution of reason to moral conduct. The failure of

both schools of moral thought imparts a tragic aspect to the whole history of morality in Western culture.

The

rationalists

from the

Stoics to

Kant have correctly

assessed the role of reason in morality, but have not been able to relate

it

to the

dynamic aspects of

reason discloses the "moral law." gests, the total field of life in

rational

man

is

It

life. It is

true that

reveals, or at least sug-

which obligation moves. The

thus able to recognize the mutual relation-

Love

as a Possibility

293

and life in America, which the ignorant man does not see and for which he therefore recognizes no obligation. Furthermore, reason discloses how uncontrolled impulses create anarchy both within the self and within the social whole. Against this anarchy it sets the ideal of order. Reason tries to establish a system of coherence and consistency in conduct as well as in the realm of truth. It conceives of its harmonies of life with life not only in ever wider and more inclusive terms, but also works for equal justice within each area of harmony by the simple fact that the special privileges of injustice are brought under rational condemnation for their inconsistency. Under the canons of rational consistency men can claim for themselves only what is genuinely valuable and they cannot claim value for any of their desires if they are not valuable to others beside themselves. Reason thus forces them to share every privilege except those which are necessary to insure the performance of a special funcships between, let us say, life in Africa

tion in the interest of the whole.

A

large percentage of all thereby ruled out by the canons of reason; a fact which persuaded the Enlightenment to expect injustice to vanish with ignorance and has tempted a modern radical rationalist to seek the destruction of social injustice by the simple expedient of puncturing the illusions and prejudices by which social injustice justifies itself in the eyes of both its victims and its beneficiaries.^ Even utilitarian moral rationalism is not altogether wrong; for on certain levels of conduct reason discloses harmonies of life so immediate and so necessary that only the most heedless egoism will destroy them, since their destruction involves the despecial privilege

is

struction of the ego's interests.

Reason,

what

it

in short, discovers that life in its essence is

is

in

much more

its

actual existence, that ideally

it

not

involves

harmonies than actually exist in hiswhat the Stoics, meant by the natural law, though neither the Stoics, nor the Age of Reason after them, were always clear whether natural law was the ideal to which reason pointed or certain universally accepted standards of conduct in actual history, a confusion which tory. This

1

Cf.

Robert

inclusive

is

Briffault, Rational Evolution

and Breakdown.

294

Reinhold Niebuhr

sometimes led to a curious compound of radical and conventional morality in both cases. Romanticism with its undue and uncritical emphasis upon the moral dynamic of the emotions failed to do justice to this critical function of reason in the moral life; and Protestant orthodoxy, allowed its idea of total depravity in which man's rationality was involved, to betray it into contempt for the rational contribution to morality. Furthermore, reason could only project a law and men could be saved not by law, but by grace. The errors of Romanticism were partially corrected, at least at this point, by the Enlightenment; but the error of orthodox Protestantism (particularly Lutheran Protestantism) contributed to is

its

ineptness in the field of social ethics. The fact whole always had to borrow from

that Christianity as a

some scheme of rationalism to complete its ethical structure. The early Church borrowed from Stoicism and Thomasian Catholicism appropriated Aristotelian doctrine to provide a foundation for its more distinctively Christian superstructure.

In spite of these necessary contributions of reason to

moral conduct and of rationalism to moral theory, no rational moral idealism can create moral conduct. It can provide principles of criticism and norms; but such norms do not contain a dynamic for their realization. In both Stoic and Kantian moral theory the conflict in the human psyche is mistakenly defined and virtuous reason is set at variance with the evil impulses. In both cases the social impulses with which men are endowed by nature are placed outside of the moral realm. Thus the Stoics regarded the sentiment of pity as evil and in Kantian ethics only actions which are motivated by reverence for the moral law are good, a criterion which would put the tenderness of a mother for her child outside of the pale of moral action. Rationalism not only suppresses the emotional supports of moral action unduly, but it has no understanding for the problem of moral dynamics and has, therefore, failed dismally in encouraging men toward the realization of the ideals which it has projected. Laws are not automatically obeyed, whether the laws of the state or the higher law of reason. Henri Bergson criticizes the Stoics for their inabil-

Love

as a Possibility

295

ity to produce a morality consistent with their universalistic idealism.- In view of the fact that in every system of moral

thought, achievements

No No

fall

short of ideals, and

deed is all its thought had been, wish but feels the fleshly screen.

may seem

unjust to single out the Stoics for condemnawhen the lives of an Epictetus and a Marcus Aurelius give a luster of moral sincerity to a system of thought which the reputed hypocrisies and dishonesties of a Seneca, Cicero, and Brutus cannot altogether dim. NeverIt

tion, particularly

theless,

it

remains true that Stoicism was unable to arrest

the decay of

whole,

little

Roman

life

and that

more than an

its

idealism was,

on the

affectation of a small intelligent

aristocracy.

The effort of various types of rational idealism to provide an adequate dynamic for their ideal or an adequate theory of dynamics vary greatly; they are similar only in their common inadequacy. Utilitarian rationalism sought to use reason to harness egoistic passion to social goals. It thought that the intellectual demonstration of the ultimate interrelatedness of all life could persuade men to affirm the interests of their neighbors in immediate situations out of selfregarding motives. The theory is absurd because in immediate situations one life may actually live at the expense of another; in such situations egoistic purpose can hardly be beguiled by considerations of what life is and ought to be in its truest and most ultimate essence. According to the naturalistic rationalism of John Dewey, reason cuts the channels into which life will inevitably flow because life is itself dynamic. Reason supplies the direction and the natural power of life-as-impulse insures the movein the direction of the rationally projected goal. The theory presupposes a nonexistent unity of man's impulsive life, a greater degree of rational transcendence over impulse than actually exists and a natural obedience of impulse to the ideal which all history refutes. Nothing in the theory could explain why the nations of the world are still so far

ment

2

Henri Bergson,

Two

Sources of Religion

and Morality,

p. 52.

296

Reinhold Niebuhr

from

realizing the rationally projected

and universally ac-

cepted goal of universal peace.^ The explanation in terms of the theory would probably be that reason had not yet sufficiently corroded the old tribal behavior patterns of the nations; but such an explanation hardly does justice to the non-traditional and immediately vital and spontaneous impulses toward war. If the naturalists among the rationalists think that reason can beguile natural life to extend itself beyond itself, the Kantian idealists can find no effective contact between the real and the ideal world. The intelligible self is the lawgiver and imposes the law of rational consistency: Act so as to make thy action the basis of universal law. But what is to persuade men to obey the law? An inherent force of reverence for law, the sense of obligation. There are two difficulties in this interpretation. One is that the law is only in the realm of essential and not in existential reality. It therefore has no force in the realm of existence to secure its realization. The other error follows naturally from the first: The intelligible self with its sense of obligation is hopelessly cut off from the sensible self of the passions and desires of natural life. The ideal cannot get itself realized; it cannot even enlist the forces of nature in man which inchoately support the ideal. The failure of Kantian ethics and of rationalistic ethics in general gives the most important clue to importance of the Christian doctrine of love and the Christian faith in God which supports it. Faith in God means faith in the transcendent unity of essence and existence, of the ideal and the real world. The cleavage between them in the historical world is not a cleavage between impulse and reason, though it is by reason that the "law of God" is most fully apprehended. The cleavage can only be mythically expressed as one between obedience and sin, between good will and evil will. This cleavage is ultimately overcome by love. Now love implies an uncoerced giving of the self to the object of its devotion. It is thus a fulfillment of the law; for in perfect love all law is transcended and what is and what ought to be are one. The self is coerced neither by a » Cf.

John Dewey,

Human

Nature and Conduct, pp. 79-83.

Love society to

by

conform

to

as a Possibility

minimal standards nor

is

it

297

coerced

other intelligible or rational or ideal self. manifestly this perfect love is, like God, in the realm of transcendence. What relevance does it have, then, to the historical world and what moral action is it able to its

Now

invoke in

human

beings in whom "there is a law in their against the law that is in their minds"?

members which wars The answer is given

paradox of the love commandparadox; for love cannot be love God with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds means that every cleavage in human existence is overcome. But the fact that such an attitude is commanded proves that the cleavage is not overcome; the command comes from one side of reahty to the other, from essence to existence. in the

To command love is a commanded or demanded. To

ment.

The

ideal of love

which appeals

is

thus

to the will.

first

What

of all a commandment the human will? It is

is

neither the total personality nor yet the rational element in It is the total organized personality moving

personality.

self. The will imbut not a cleavage primarily between reason and impulse. The will is a rational organization of impulse. Consequently, the Christian ideal of a loving will does not exclude the impulses and emotions in nature through which the self is organically related to other life. Jesus therefore relates the love of God to the natural love of parents for their children: "If ye then, being evil,

against the recalcitrant elements in the

plies a cleavage in the self

know how

to give

good

gifts

unto your children,

how much

more will your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?" In its appreciation of every natural emotion of sympathy and

pity, of

solidarity, the ethic of Jesus

is

consanguinity and

distinguished

human

from the

ethics

of rationalism. In this respect there are points of contact

between Christianity and Romanticism, perhaps most fully revealed in such men as St. Francis. The moral will is not a force of reason imposed upon the emotions. It utilizes whatever forces in nature carry Hfe beyond itself. But since the forces of nature carry life beyond itself only to enslave it again to the larger self of family, race, and community, Christian ethics never has, as in Romanticism, an uncritical

298

Reinhold Niebuhr sociality. They all stand under "how much more" and under the

toward impulses of

attitude

the perspective of the

criticism, "If ye love those

who

love you what thanks have

ye."

The "natural man" is not only under the criticism of these absolute perspectives, but under obligation to emulate the love of God, to forgive as God forgives, to love his enemies as God loves them. Love as natural endowment, ergs, is transmuted under this religious tension into agape.* In Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Morality and Religion the religious force which breaks through the "closed morality" of devotion to family and community is called the force of mysticism. The word mysticism to designate what Bergson has in mind is badly chosen because of the tendency toward passivity and contemplation rather than moral creativity in mysticism, a tendency Bergson himself recognizes but seeks to confine to the eastern rather than Christian mystics.^ But his idea is correct. The motive power of a love which transcends the impulses of nature is a combination of obedience to

obedience

is

God and

of the sovereignty (basileus) of the

love of God.

The

idea of

maintained in Jesus' teachings by the concept

"Kingdom

of God."

God, usually

The element

translated as

of obedience, of a

sense of moral obligation, of a willful act of conformity to the divine standard,

good and

evil in the

is

consonant with the division between

human

impossible, because no act

is

makes perfect love which the resistance

soul which possible in

is completely absent. The element of love motive of social love is consonant with the fact

of egoism and sin

of

God

as a

good is actually present in human Both the fact that it is present and challenged by sin is expressed in the paradox of

that the attraction of the life, in

spite of

that

is

it

the love

its sin.

commandment, "Thou

shalt love." In the terms of

* Professor Anders Xygren in his Agape and Eros succinctly states this distinction as developed in Christian theology: "Eros" must always regard the love of man as the love for the good in man. . , . Agape is the precise opposite. God's love is the ground and pattern of all love. It consists in free self-giving and it finds its continuation in God's love for man; for he who has received all for nothing is constrained to pass on to others what he has received." p. 171. 6 Cf. Henri Bergson, op. cit., p. 216.

Love the moral experience of man 'I feel that I ought to love."

The God, tian religion

whom is,

to love

is

it

as a Possibility

299

might be stated in the terms,

commanded in the ChrisGod of mnhical-prophetic

thus

significantly, the

conception, which means that he is both the ground of existence and the essence which transcends existence. In this mythical paradox lies the foundation for an ethic which enables men to give themselves to values actually embodied in persons and existence, but also transcending every actuality; thereby escaping both the glorification of human, temporal, and partial values characteristic of naturalism and also the morally enervating

tendency of mysticism to regard

"love of creatures" as disloyalty to God and to confine the love of God to a rational or mystic contemplation of the divine essence which transcends all finite existence. What-

ever the weaknesses of Christianity in the field of social morality, history attests its fruitfulness in eliciting loving and tender service to men of all sorts and conditions with-

out regard to some obvious merit which might seem to give a moral claim upon their fellow men. The Christian love commandment does not demand love of the fellow man because he is with us equally divine (Stoicism), or because we ought to have "respect for personality" (Christian liberahsm), but because God loves him. The obligation is derived, in other words, not from the obvious unities and affinities of historic existence, but from the transcendent unity of essential reality. The logic of this position is clearly stated by the Quaker saint, John Woolman, in dealing with the question of slavery: "Many slaves on this continent have been oppressed and their cries have reached the ears of the Most High. Such is the purity and certainty of His judgments that he can not be partial to any. In infinite love and goodness he has opened our understanding from time to time, respecting our duty of these people." Naturally such a religious presupposition operates to make men sensitive to the actual underlying unities of human life in historic existence, as expressed, for instance, in the words of St. Paul: "He hath made of one blood all the races of men." But the obligation is derived from a more transcendent unity and

them

''

«

Gummere, Journal

of

John Woolman,

p.

216.

300

Reinhold Niebuhr

purity of value than any historic realities, and

is

therefore

proof against the disappointments and disillusions of naturalistic morality, in which there is always a touch of a romantic exaggeration of the goodness of man and a corresponding cynical reaction. But the insistence upon the Creation as a work of God always saves prophetic religion from contempt for the partial and imperfect values of history and a consequent identification of religion with a passive contemplation of a transcendent ideal beyond existence. Unfortunately, historic Christianity has sometimes been partially beguiled from this prophetic position, as, for instance, in the theology of Thomas Aquinas in which Aristotelian rationalism influences him to regard a rational and mystical contemplation of the divine as religiously superior to ethical action.

The Christian doctrine of love is thus the most adequate metaphysical and psychological framework for the approximation of the ideal of love in human life. It is able to appropriate all the resources of human nature which tend toward the harmony of life with life, without resting in the resources of "natural man." It is able to set moral goals transcending nature without being lost in other-worldliness. The degree of approximation depends upon the extent to which the Christian faith is not merely a theory, but a living and vital presupposition of life and conduct. The long history of Christianity is, in spite of its many failures, not wanting in constant and perennial proofs that love is the fruit of its spirit. Martyrs and saints, missionaries and prophets, apostles and teachers of the faith, have showed forth in their lives the pity and tenderness toward their fel-

low men which

is

the

crown of the Christian

Christianity failed to impart to the ordinary tions of ordinary

men

Nor has human rela-

life.

the virtues of tenderness and consid-

eration.

While every religion, as indeed every human world view, must finally justify itself in terms of its moral fruits, it must be understood that the moral fruits of religion are not the consequence of a conscious effort to achieve them. The love commandment is a demand upon the will, but the human will is not enabled to conform to it because moralistic ap-

Love

made

as a Possibility

301

obey the commandment. Moralistic appeals are in fact indications of the dissipation of primary religious vitality. Men cannot, by taking thought, strengthen peals are

to

their will. If the will

the

is

moment, moving

the total organized personality of recalcitrant impulse, the

against

its

upon the strength of the factors organization. Consequently, the acts and

attitudes of love in

which the ordinary resources of nature

strength of the will depends

which enter

into

are supplemented are partly the consequence of historic

which have become a part of the and partly the result of concatenations of circumstance in which the pressure of events endows the individual with powers not ordinarily his own. and traditional

disciplines

socio-spiritual inheritance of the individual

The soldier's courage, his ability to transcend the inclination of "natural man" to flee death, is the fruit of a great tradition and the spirit of the military community which enforces it. In the same manner the tenderness and graciousness with which men are able to regard the problems of their fellow men, beyond the natural inclinations of human nature, is the fruit of a religio-moral tradition and the loyalty of a religious community to the tradition. Even if we cannot accept St. Paul's Christ-mysticism, bordering as it does on the very edge of the magical, it is nevertheless true that the Church is the body of Christ and that the noble living and the noble dead in her communion help to build up in her the living Christ, a dimension of life which transcends the inclinations of natural man. It is consequently natural and inevitable that the faithful should regard genuine acts of love as proceeding from propulsions which are not their own, and should confess with St. Paul, "I, yet not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me." Sometimes the act of complete self-abnegation, the pouring out of life for other life, is the consequence of pressures of a given moment which endow the individual with resources beyond his natural capacities. The mother who sacrifices her life for her child is enabled to do this by the heightening of the natural impulses of mother love in a moment of crisis. In soberer moments of reflection she could not give herself so completely for another life. The same

302

Reinhold Niebuhr

mother who thus sacrifices herself might conceivably be engaged in more prosaic moments in shrewd unconscious calculations in which mother love is compounded with the will-to-power. Martyrs do not achieve martyrdom by taking thought. Whether a man stands or yields in the hour of crisis is of course determined by commitments made before the crisis arises. Devotion to a cause may be such that it becomes irrevocable and its revocation would result in the complete disintegration of personality. The crisis with its impending martyrdom adds its emotional pressures to the commitment of previous years. Furthermore, a strong devotion to a cause absorbs the individual in the cause so that the entire socio-spiritual impetus of the enterprise sustains him in the hour of crisis and endows him with resources which transcend anything possessed in his own right. The Catholic doctrine that faith, hope, and love are "theological" virtues which are added to the moral possibilities of natural man by an infusion of grace is thus, broadly speaking, true to the facts. Only it is not true that the grace which is added is necessarily infused by the sacraments nor even that the Christian faith is its only possible presupposition. The grace of God is not confined so narrowly as the theological defenders of historic religious instilike to confine it. But there are, nevertheless, which can only be described as the grace of God. What men are able to will depends not upon the strength of their willing, but upon the strength which enters their will and over which their will has little control. All moral action really stands under the paradox: "Work out your salvation in fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to do his good pleasure." But love is not only a fruit of grace, but also a fruit of faith; which is to say that the total spiritual attitude which informs a life determines to what height a moral action may rise in a given moment. Deeds of love are not the consequence of specific acts of the will. They are the consequence of the religio-moral tension in life which is possible only if

tutions

would

forces in life

the individual consciously lives in the total dimension of life. The real motives of love, according to the Christian gospel, are gratitude

and

contrition. Gratitude

and

contri-

Love

as a Possibility

tion are the fruits of a prophetic faith

which knows

303 life in

its depths. To believe in God is to know essence and not only in its momentary existence. Thus to know it means that what is dark, arbitrary, and contingent in momentary existence can neither be accepted

its

heights and in

life in its

complacently nor tempt to despair. To understand life in its total dimension means contrition because every moral achievement stands under the criticism of a more essential goodness. If fully analyzed the moral achievement is not only convicted of imperfection, but of sin. It is not only wanting in perfect goodness, but there is something of the perversity of evil in it. Such contrition does not destroy selfishness in the human heart. But there is a difference between the man who understands something of the mystery of evil in his own soul and one who comjplacently accepts human egoism as a force which must be skillfully balanced with altruism in order that moral unity may be achieved. To understand life in its total dimension means to accept it with grateful reverence as good. It is good in its ultimate essence even when it seems evil and chaotic in its contingent and momentary reality. Faith in its essence is not an arbitrary faith.

Once

held, actual historic existence verifies

for there are in life as

we know

it

in history

and nature

it;

in-

numerable symbols of its ultimate and essential nature. Grateful reverence toward the goodness of life is a motive force of love in more than one sense. Gratitude for what essence creates a propulsive power to affirm in is truly essential, the harmony of life with life. Furthermore, under the insights of such a faith, the fellow man becomes something more than the creature of time and place, separated from us by the contingencies of nature and geography and set against us by the necessities of animal existence. His life is seen under the aura of the divine and he participates in the glory, dignity and beauty of existence. We do not love him because he is "divine." If that pantheistic note creeps into prophetic faith it leads to disare all imillusion. He is no more divine than we are. bedded in the contingent and arbitrary life of animal existence and we have corrupted the harmless imperfections

life is in its

existence

what

We

304

Albert

Camus

of nature with the corruptions of sin. Yet we are truly "children of God" and something of the transcendent unity, in which we are one in God, shines through both the evil of nature and the evil in man. Our heart goes out to our fellow man, when seen through the eyes of faith, not only because we see him thus under a transcendent perspective but because we see ourselves under it and know that we are sinners just as he is. Awed by the majesty and goodness of God, something of the pretense of our pretentious self is destroyed and the natural cruelty of our self -righteousness is mitigated by emotions of pity and forgiveness. The moral effectiveness of the religious life thus depends upon deeper resources than moral demands upon the will. Whenever the modem pulpit contents itself with the presentation of these demands, however urgent and fervent, it reveals its enslavement to the rationalistic presuppositions of our era. The law of love is not obeyed simply by being

known. Whenever it is obeyed at all, it is because life in its beauty and terror has been more fully revealed to man. The love that cannot be willed may nevertheless grow as a natural fruit upon a tree which has roots deep enough to be nurtured by springs of life beneath the surface and branches reaching up to heaven.

22.

Love and Rebellion

Albert

Camus

In his plays, novels and essays, Albert Camus has tried to discover a way out of the intellectual dead-end of nihilism

with which this generation has been faced. By what values, he asks again and again, can we survive in an era of spiritual devastation? Stripped of illusion, questioning all absolutes, Camus calls, in the name of humanity, on love as a

— Love and Rebellion value which

is

305

not given but grows out of the conditions of

living.

Myth

Camus

considered the imThe Rebel, from whose rhapsodic final pages the larger part of this whether to endure selection is drawn, the issue is murder or not to endure. In Camus's severe doctrine rebellion makes it possible to hope, to have confidence in man and his future. "Camus beHeves that revolt is one of the 'essenIn The

of Sisyphus,

plications of suicide

—

first

to live or not to live. In

—

tial

dimensions' of mankind," Sir Herbert

the Foreword. "It

is

useless to

deny

its

Read

writes in

historical reality

we must seek in it a principle of existence. But the nature of revolt has changed radically in our times. It is no longer the revolt of the slave against the master, nor even the revolt of the poor against the rich; it is a metaphysical revolt, the revolt of man against the conditions of life, rather

against creation

itself.

At

the

same time,

One

it is

an aspiration

—

even, paradoxically,

it

becomes under the

toward clarity and unity of thought toward order. That, at least, is what intellectual guidance of Camus."

of France's leading writers, winner of the

Nobel The

Prize for Literature, Albert Camus's novels include

The Plague and The Fall. Reprinted from the Vintage Books Edition of The Rebel by Albert Camus, translated by Anthony Bower, copyright 1956 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. By special arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Stranger,

Love and Rebellion

What

is

a rebel?

A man who says no, but whose refusal does He

not imply a renunciation.

from the moment he makes slave

who

is

also a

man who

says yes,

his first gesture of rebellion.

A

suddenly decides that command. What does he mean by

has taken orders

all his life

he cannot obey some new saying "no"? He means, for example, that "this has been going on too long," "up to this point yes, beyond it no," "you are going

306

Albert

Camus

too far," or, again, "there is a limit beyond which you shall not go." In other words, his no affirms the existence of a borderline. The same concept is to be found in the rebel's feeling that the other person "is exaggerating," that he is exerting his authority beyond a limit where he begins to infringe on the rights of others. Thus the movement of rebellion is founded simultaneously on the categorical rejection of an intrusion that is considered intolerable and on the confused conviction of an absolute right which, in the rebel's mind, is more precisely the impression that he "has ." Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling the right to .

that,

.

somewhere and somehow, one

is

way

right. It is in this

and no simultaneously. He and affirms that there are limits and also that he suspects wishes to preserve the existence of certain things on this that the rebel slave says yes

—

—

side of the borderline.

He

demonstrates, with obstinacy,

something in him which "is worth while ^ ." and which must be taken into consideration. In a certain way, he confronts an order of things which oppresses him with the insistence on a kind of right not to be oppressed beyond the limit that he can tolerate. that there

is

.

In every act of rebellion, the rebel simultaneously experiences a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights and a complete and spontaneous loyalty to certain aspects of himself. Thus he implicitly brings into play a

standard of values so far from being gratuitous that he is prepared to support it no matter what the risks. Up to this point he has at least remained silent and has abandoned himself to the form of despair in which a condition is accepted even though it is considered unjust. To remain silent is to give the impression that one has no opinions, that one

wants nothing, and in certain cases it really amounts to wanting nothing. Despair, like the absurd, has opinions and desires about everything in general and nothing in particular. Silence expresses this attitude very well. But from the moment that the rebel finds his voice even though he says nothing but "no" he begins to desire and to judge. The rebel, in the etymological sense, does a complete turnabout. He acted under the lash of his master's whip. Suddenly he

—

—

Love and Rebellion

307

turns and faces him. He is not. Not every value entails rebellion, but every act of rebellion tacitly invokes a value. Or is it really a question

opposes what

is

preferable to what

of values?

Awareness, no matter

how

confused

may

it

be, develops

act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can iden-

from every

only for a moment. Up to now this really experienced. Before he rebelled, the slave accepted all the demands made upon him. Very often he even took orders, without reacting against them, which were far more conducive to insurrection than the one at which he balks. He accepted them patiently, though he may have protested inwardly, but in that he remained silent he was more concerned with his own immediate interests than as yet aware of his own rights. But with with impatience a reaction begins which loss of patience can extend to everything that he previously accepted, and which is almost always retroactive. The very moment the slave refuses to obey the humiliating orders of his master, he simultaneously rejects the condition of slavery. The act of rebellion carries him far beyond the point he had reached by simply refusing. He exceeds the bounds that he fixed for his antagonist, and now demands to be treated as an equal. What was at first the man's obstinate resistance now becomes the whole man, who is identified with and summed up in this resistance. The part of himself that he wanted to be respected he proceeds to place above everything else and tify himself,

identification

even

if

was never

—

proclaims

it

preferable

—

to

even to

everything,

life

it-

becomes for him the supreme good. Having up to now been willing to compromise, the slave suddenly .") an attitude of adopts ("because this is how it must be All or Nothing. With rebellion, awareness is bom. But we can see that the knowledge gained is, at the same time, of an "all" that is still rather obscure and of a "nothself.

It

.

.

ing" that proclaims the possibility of sacrificing the rebel to The rebel himself wants to be "all"— to identify himself completely with this good of which he has suddenly become aware and by which he wants to be personally recthis "All."

308

Albert

Camus

ognized and acknowledged

—or "nothing";

in other words,

to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom. Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees. Values, according to good authorities, "most often repre-

which

from facts to rights, from what is desired what is desirable (usually through the intermediary of what is generally considered desirable)."^ The transition from facts to rights is manifest, as we have seen, in rebellion. So is the transition from "this must be" to "this is how I should like things to be," and even more so, perhaps, the sent a transition

to

idea of the sublimation of the individual in a henceforth universal good. The sudden appearance of the concept of "All or Nothing" demonstrates that rebellion, contrary to

current opinion, and though

most

is

it

from everything that man, questions the very

springs

strictly individualistic in

idea of the individual. If the individual, in fact, accepts death and happens to die as a consequence of his act of rebellion, he demonstrates by doing so that he is willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of a

considers

more important than

his

common good which he own

destiny. If

he pre-

death to the negation of the rights that he defends, it is because he considers these rights more important than himself. Therefore he is acting in the name of certain values which are still indeterminate but which he feels are common to himself and to all men. We see that the affirmation implicit in every act of rebellion is extended to something that transcends the individual in so far as it withdraws him from his supposed solitude and provides him with a reason to act. But it is already worth noting that this concept of values as pre-existant to any kind of action contradicts the purely historical philosophies, in which values are acquired (if they are ever acquired) after the action has been completed. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent fers the risk of

1

Lalande:

Vocabulaire philosophique.

Love and Rebellion

309

worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men even the man who insults and oppresses him have a natural community."

in oneself

—

—

Two observations will support this argument. First, we can see that an act of rebelHon is not, essentially, an egoistic act. Of course, it can have egoistic motives. But one can rebel equally well against lies as against oppression. over, the rebel

the

moment

—once he has accepted

of his greatest impetus

that he risks everything.

More-

the motives and at

—preserves nothing of

He demands

in

respect for himself,

course, but only in so far as he identifies himself with a

natural community.

Then we note that rebellion does not arise only, and among the oppressed, but that it can also be

necessarily,

caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someelse is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual. And it must be pointed out that this is not a question of psychological a mere subterfuge by which the individual identification imagines that it is he himself who has been offended. On the contrary, it can often happen that we cannot bear to see offenses done to others which we ourselves have accepted without rebelling. The suicides of the Russian terrorists in Siberia as a protest against their comrades' being whipped is a case in point. Nor is it a question of the feeling of a

one

—

community of

interests. Injustices

done

to

men whom we

consider enemies can, actually, be profoundly repugnant to us. There is only identification of one's destiny with that of others and a choice of sides. Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the

embodiment of

the values he

wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them. When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical. But for the moment 2 The community of victims is the same as that which unites victim and executioner. But the executioner does not know this.

310

we

Albert

Camus

are only talking of the kind of solidarity that

is

bom

in

chains. It

would be possible for us

to define the positive aspect of

the values implicit in every act of rebellion by comparing them with a completely negative concept like that of resent-

ment as defined by Scheler. Rebellion is, in fact, much more than pursuit of a claim, in the strongest sense of the word. Resentment intoxication

—

is

very well defined by Scheler as an auto-

the evil secretion, in a sealed vessel, of pro-

longed impotence. Rebellion, on the contrary, breaks the seal and aUows the whole being to come into play. It liberates stagnant waters and turns them into a raging torrent. Scheler himself emphasizes the passive aspect of resentment and remarks on the prominent place it occupies in the psychology 9f women who are dedicated to desire and possession. The fountainhead of rebellion, on the contrary, is the principle of superabundant activity and energy. Scheler is also right in saying that resentment is always highly colored by envy. But one envies what one does not have, while the rebel's aim is to defend what he is. He does not merely claim sorne good that he does not possess or of which he was deprived. His aim is to claim recognition for something which he has and which has already been recognized by him, in almost every case, as more important than anything of which he could be envious. Rebellion is not realistic. According to Scheler, resentment always turns into either unscrupulous ambition or bitterness, depending on whether it is implanted in a strong person or a weak one. But in both cases it is a question of wanting to be something other than what one is. Resentment is always resentment against oneself. The rebel, on the contrary, from his very first step, refuses to allow anyone to touch what he is. He is fighting for the integrity of one part of his being. He does not try, primarily, to conquer, but simply to impose. Finally, it would seem that resentment takes delight, in advance, in the pain that it would like the object of its envy to feel. Nietzsche and Scheler are right in seeing an excellent example of this in the passage where Tertullian informs his readers that one of the greatest sources of happiness

Love and Rebellion

among perors

the blessed will be the spectacle of the

consumed

in the fires of hell. This

311

Roman em-

kind of happiness

by the decent people who go to watch executions. The rebel, on the contrary, limits himself, as a is

also experienced

matter of principle, to refusing to be humiliated without asking that others should be. He will even accept pain provided his integrity is respected. It is therefore hard to understand why Scheler completely identifies the spirit of rebellion with resentment. His criticism of the resentment to be found in humanitarianism (which he treats as the non-Christian form of love for mankind) could perhaps be applied to certain indeterminate forms of humanitarian idealism, or to the techniques of terror.

But

it

rings false in relation to man's rebellion

—

the movement that enlists the individual in the defense of a dignity common to all men. Scheler wants to demonstrate that humanitarian feelings are against his condition

always accompanied by a hatred of the world. Humanity is loved in general in order to avoid having to love anybody in particular. This is correct, in some cases, and it is easier to understand Scheler when we realize that for him humanitarianism is represented by Bentham and Rousseau. But man's love for man can be bom of other things than a mathematical calculation of the resultant rewards or a theoretical confidence in human nature. In face of the utilitarians, and of fimile's preceptor, there is, for example, the kind of logic, embodied by Dostoievsky in Ivan Karamazov, which progresses from an act of rebeUion to metaphysical insurrection. Scheler is aware of this and sums up the concept in the following manner: 'There is not enough love in the world to squander it on anything but human beings." Even if this proposition were true, the appalling despair that it implies would merit anything but contempt. In fact, it misunderstands the tortured character of Kara-

mazov's rebellion. Ivan's drama, on the contrary, arises from the fact that there is too much love without an object. This love finding no outlet and God being denied, it is then decided to lavish it on human beings as a generous act of complicity. Nevertheless, in the act of rebeUion as

we have

envisaged

312

Albert

Camus

now, an abstract ideal is not chosen through lack of feeling and in pursuit of a sterile demand. We insist that the part of man which cannot be reduced to mere ideas should be taken into consideration the passionate side of his nature that serves no other purpose than to be part of the act of living. Does this imply that no rebellion is motivated by resentment? No, and we know it only too well in this age of malice. But we must consider the idea of rebellion in its widest sense on pain of betraying it; and in its widest sense rebellion goes far beyond resentment. When HeathWuthering Heights, says that he puts his love cliff, in above God and would willingly go to hell in order to be reunited with the woman he loves, he is prompted not only by youth and humiliation but by the consuming experience of a whole lifetime. The same emotion causes Eckart, in a surprising fit of heresy, to say that he prefers hell with Jesus to heaven without Him. This is the very essence of love. Contrary to Scheler, it would therefore be impossible to overemphasize the passionate affirmation that underlies the act of rebellion and distinguishes it from resentment. Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended. it

up

to

—

Beyond Nihilism There does exist for man, therefore, a way of acting and of thinking which is possible on the level of moderation to which he belongs. Every undertaking that is more ambitious proves to be contradictory. The absolute is not all, created through history. Politics is not religion, or if it is, then it is nothing but the Inquisition. How would society define an absolute? Perhaps everyone is looking for this absolute on behalf of all. But society and politics only have the responsibility of arranging everyone's affairs so that each will have the leisure and the freedom to pursue this common search. History can then no longer be presented as an object of worship. It is only an opportunity that must be rendered fruitful by a vigilant rebellion. "Obsession with the harvest and indifference to history,"

than

this

attained nor, above

Love and Rebellion

313

two extremities of my bow." If the duration of history is not synonymous with the duration of the harvest, then history, in effect, is no more that a fleeting and cruel shadow in which man has no writes

Rene Char admirably, "are

the

He who dedicates himself to this history dedicates himself to nothing and, in his turn, is nothing. But he who dedicates himself to the duration of his life, to the house he builds, to the dignity of mankind, dedicates himself tq the earth and reaps from it the harvest that sows its seed and sustains the world again and again. Finally, it is those who know how to rebel, at the appropriate moment, against his-

part.

tory

who

really

advance

its

interests.

To

rebel against

it

supposes an interminable tension and the agonized serenity of which Rene Char also speaks. But the true life is present in the heart of this dichotomy. Life is this dichotomy itself, the mind soaring over volcanoes of light, the madness of

extenuating intransigence of moderation. The at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of

justice, the

words that reverberate for us

virtue.

No possible form of wisdom today can claim to give more. Rebellion indefatigably confronts evil, from which it can only derive a new impetus. Man can master in himself everything that should be mastered. He should rectify in creation everything that can be rectified. And after he has done so, children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish arithmetically the sufferings of the world. But the injustice and the suffering of the world will remain and, no matter how limited they are, they will not cease to be an outrage. Dimitri Karamazov's cry of "Why?" will continue to resound; art and rebellion will die only with the last man. There is an evil, undoubtedly, which men accumulate in their frantic desire for unity. But yet another evil lies at the roots of this inordinate movement. Confronted with this evil, confronted with death, man from the very depths of his soul cries out for justice. Historical Christianity has only

314

Albert

Camus

replied to this protest against evil by the annunciation of the kingdom and then of eternal life, which demands faith.

But suffering exhausts hope and faith and then is left alone and unexplained. The toiling masses, worn out with suffering and death, are masses without God. Our place is henceforth at their side, far from teachers, old or new. Historical Christianity postpones to a point beyond the span of history the cure of evil and murder, which are nevertheless experienced within the span of history. Contemporary materialism also believes that it can answer all questions. But, as a slave to history, it increases the domain of historic murder and at the same time leaves it without any justification, exwhich again demands faith. In both cept in the future cases one must wait, and meanwhile the innocent continue to die. For twenty centuries the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world. No paradise, whether divine or revolutionary, has been realized. An injustice remains inextricably bound to all suffering, even the most deserved in the eyes of men. The long silence of Prometheus before the powers that overwhelmed him still cries out in protest. But Prometheus, meanwhile, has seen men rail and turn against him. Crushed between human evil and destiny, between terror and the arbitrary, all that remains to him is his power to rebel in order to save from murder him who can still be

—

saved, without surrendering to the arrogance of blasphemy. Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without

a strange form of love. Those history are

condemned

who

find

no

rest in

who,

God

or in

themfor the humiliated. The most

to live for those

like

selves, cannot live: in fact, pure form of the movement of rebellion is thus crowned with the heart-rending cry of Karamazov: if all are not saved, what good is the salvation of one only? Thus Catholic

communion made it obliga-

prisoners, in the prison cells of Spain, refuse

today because the priests of the regime have

tory in certain prisons. These lonely witnesses to the cruciif it must be paid and oppression. This insane generosity is the generosity of rebellion, which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment's delay refuses injustice. Its merit lies in making no calculations, distribut-

fixion of innocence also refuse salvation

for

by

injustice

Love and Rebellion ing everything

it

possesses to

life

and

thus that it is prodigal in its gifts generosity toward the future lies in giving

Rebellion proves in this

and that

way

that

315

men. It is to men to come. Real to living

it is

all

to the present.

the very

movement

cannot be denied without renouncing life. Its purest outburst, on each occasion, gives birth to existence. Thus it is love and fecundity or it is nothing at all. Revolution without honor, calculated revolution which, in preferring an abstract concept of man to a man of flesh and of

life

it

blood, denies existence as

many

times as

is

necessary, puts

resentment in the place of love. Immediately rebellion, forgetful of its generous origins, allows itself to be contaminated by resentment; it denies life, dashes toward destruction, and raises up the grimacing cohorts of petty rebels, embryo slaves all of them, who end by offering themselves for sale, today, in all the marketplaces of Europe, to no matter what form of servitude. It is no longer either revolution or rebellion but rancor, malice, and tyranny. Then,

name of power and of history bemurderous and immoderate mechanism, a new rebellion is consecrated in the name of moderation and of life. We are at that extremity now. At the end of this tunnel of darkness, however, there is inevitably a light, which we already divine and for which we only have to fight to en-

when

comes

sure

revolution in the a

its

coming. All of us, among the ruins, are preparing

a renaissance

know

beyond the

limits of nihilism.

But few of us

it.

Already, in fact, rebellion, without claiming to solve its problems. From this moment high noon is borne away on the fast-moving stream of history. Around the devouring flames, shadows writhe in mortal combat for an instant of time and then as suddenly disappear, and the blind, fingering their eyelids, cry out that this is history. The men of Europe, abandoned to the shadows, have turned their backs upon the fixed and radiant point of the present. They forget the present for the future, the fate of humanity for the delusion of power, the misery of the slums for the mirage of the eternal city, ordinary justice for an empty promised land. They despair of

everything, can at least confront

316

Albert

Camus

personal freedom and dream of a strange freedom of the species; reject solitary death and give the name of immortality to a vast collective agony. They no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life. Its blind men entertain the puerile belief that to love one single day of life amounts to justifying whole centuries of oppression. That is why they wanted to efface joy from the world and to postpone it imtil a much later date. Impatience with limits, the rejection of their double life, despair at being a man, to inhuman excesses. Denying the they have had to stake all on their own excellence. For want of something better to do, they deified themselves and their misfortunes began; these gods have had their eyes put out. Kaliayev, and his brothers throughout the entire world, refuse, on the contrary, to be deified in that they refuse the unlimited power to inflict death. They choose, and give us as an example the only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man, to refuse to be a god. At this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects diVinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of aU men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing. Now is bom that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche, who for twelve years after his downfall was con-

have real

finally driven

grandeur of

them

life,

by the West as the blasted image of its knowledge and its nihilism; nor the prophet of justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers' plot at Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass cofl&n; nor any part of what the intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly furnished

tinually invoked loftiest

Love and Rebellion

317

may

indeed live again, side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history to the pride of a contemptible period. All

and

in spite of

it,

that

which he owns already, the thin yield

of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and

The bow bends; the wood complains. of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and its

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free.

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