Béla Hamvas: Heloïse and Abélard

1.                                                                        

Only ephemeral works are worth publishing; immortal ones can stay in manuscripts. When the author dies the maid can collect them in a basket and take them to the kitchen to make the fire. If something has been written immortally, its existence does not depend on human memory. It has triumphed somewhere else, eternally and infinitely. It did not want credit or fame, money or power, it did not wish to teach or please. Why would it want fame, money, power, praise or credit? Every work takes place somewhere, and in every work something takes place. Almost all of them take place here on earth, between man and man. I want to persuade someone, I want to entertain, teach, fight, argue, conquer, amaze. The eternal work does not take place here. But higher. And deeper. And what is in it takes place between man and God. It has taken place. Even if no one knows. And God remembers in his heart when the paper has burnt, just like a porphyry obelisk disintegrates like sand. It has nothing to do with the book any more; it does not need a reader. It does not need a storyteller.

Immortal works have almost all burnt away, and from the few we have left no one knows where they got lost, what they are, who wrote and what. No one can have an idea about the loss, just like no one can know the thoughts of the one who set off to the ocean on a lonely boat all by his own and never returned.

2.       

Abélard and Heloïse took to each other. Their correspondence, in the form it survived from the Middle Ages, is probably not authentic. Much has been written and said about their relationship. But we do not know what it was like. The letters must have later been edited by someone, who also added a lot to them and created unity in a material which was probably full of contradiction and confusion. It is the opposite of Homer’s case. Homer bound all the small heroic narratives into one, and the many names of the original authors all merged into his.

The letters of Abélard and Heloïse were also collected by such a Homeric being, but his name got lost; only the hero and the heroine survived. This is the case of anonymous immortality. There was no need for the memory of his personal self to survive. He did his job, but not for man, whom he does not even tell his name. God knows very well in his heart who he was, although his name is not important. What he wrote on these sheets of paper is human memory, it is independent of fame or praise. Among all humans, he was the only one to understand the woman, love and marriage.

3.

I cannot look through the eyes of God; I can only see the woman through my own eyes, the eyes of a man. And man has considered and still considers the woman as a being whose presence is inexplicable and irrational. 

Everything was ready in the world when she appeared; perhaps she was late, maybe she intruded. Anyway, she was not part of the original design of the world. She came later, perhaps to make up for a lack or to prevent something dangerous from happening. As if due to some fateful negligence somewhere in the world, perhaps a serious and major mistake, which threatened the whole with subversion. Here at this faulty point, in this dangerous and threatening lack the woman appeared to mend matters.

But as it usually happens, what is used to mend a mistake never fully fits the original design. It is a bit out of place; it bears marks of later creation. And as it always is, without exception, just because she was created later and does not fit the rest, she does not mend the mistake, nor does she eliminate it. She is a more or less good solution, but only a solution. She is not organically intergrown in the whole where she was placed. Therefore in the woman one can always sense that original, dangerous negligence, some kind of chasm, darkness or abyss. The woman for the man is not what the bitch is for the animal; because the bitch belongs in the animal world, it has been there ever since the beginning and is not out of place there. But the woman is. She is disquieting for two reasons: due to her place in the world, because she hides danger from man; and due to her very being, because she is not the same age as man and she is not coessential with him. As if there had been a crack left somewhere in the wall of the house, and the hole was fixed only later with a stone, which can never completely adapt.
                                                                                        

4.
          It is the man who usually has the feeling that the woman is half of his being; and he also has another feeling, that the woman is the irrational act in the world. The former opinion is shared by many, just like the latter. Nowadays the former one tends to be accepted. Only a woman and a man make a whole human being, says Kant, most probably after Swedenborg. 

Everybody has heard of Plato’s myth, according to which in times immemorial humans used to have two faces, four arms and four legs, but they were so strong that the gods were afraid of them, so they cut them into half. 

This is how the woman and the man were created. The gods did not need to be afraid any more and humans did not think about ruling the world because they spent their entire lives looking for their other half. 

Swedenborg says that in the hereafter there are no separate male and female beings, but marriages in which a man and a woman unite thus making one single spirit-being. According to Welkisch, the present day disciple of Swedenborg, man and woman are twin-spirits (Dualgeist); very rarely the twins do meet on earth, but they have to wait for each other in the hereafter and they can only enter divine existence together. After Weininger’s immature and rhapsodic theory and in accordance with Eastern teaching Jung claims: in the unconscious of every man there exists a woman, the Anima, the complementary part of the man; and in the depths of the psyche of every woman there exists a man, the Animus, the complementary part of the woman. These theories all grasp the instinctive feeling that the man is the half of the woman and the woman is the half of the man, and that the two together only can be a whole, full and complete.

Not everyone used to share this opinion. It says in one of the myths of the Kabbala that one night before Adam God destroyed the world because man was not androgynous like him, but he was only male. He only left one man and he created the woman from him too. According to this myth when God only created the man there was a mistake and this had to be corrected later. This correction, the woman, who appeared only later, is the patch over the dangerous spot of the world. This is the myth about the Idumean night.

The Bible says that before Eve appeared Adam had lived together with several beings. One is even named: Lilith, who was a charming monster. From the affair of Adam and Lilith demons were born. But the man could not live with this charming being for a long time, and this was when Eve appeared. Eve’s origin is, however, dual. Some say that the word means woman, that is, wife. According to others: Hevah means the reversed being.

Jakob Böhme claims that in paradise man was androgynous, similarly to God. When he fell he split into two and the divine woman in him rose above to God: this divine virgin was Sophia. Sophia, by the way, had also been known by the gnostics, and even in old Egypt. Man was given Eve, the flesh woman, as a substitute for Sophia.

The divine virgin is the natural half of man in paradise. But she does not live on earth. Man who fell into matter cannot live together with Sophia, the pure spirit-virgin, but received Eve as a result of his sin. Eve is not the true and perfect complement of man. Only a replacement for Sophia, a substitute, and a bad one, who is not a soul-spirit, but only flesh and blood, nature and matter.
                                                                                        

5.

 

The genius, ancient myths and mystic intuition all claim that the woman’s presence in the world is irrational. The very fact that the explanations about her metaphysical stance vary seems to prove this. There is the harmony theory, which says that the woman is the half of the man and the two together are one, but there are other theories, too, which claim that the relation between the two beings is not like that between the two halves of the whole. The variety of interpretations shows that there is something wrong here. We should come up with a list of Chinese, Hindu and other myths and mystic explanations which support either the unity or the difference concept.       

  

This is not the goal now. It is obvious that there exists and has existed in everybody and since the very beginning that disquieting something: the woman is out of place in the world or not, she fits in it or not, she often disturbs, always excites, as if she were hiding something with her being, a mistake a fateful danger, and as if she could not hide it well because her irrational being only increases this danger, and by hiding it, only makes it even more enticing, and she herself does not belong in the whole of the world. The origin of the woman is completely different from that of the man.     

    

This confusion is only exacerbated by the fact that the psychology of the woman has never been understood by anyone. Whatever has been attempted in this field is less than pathetic. Most do not go further than basing their arguments on Eve the woman-wife, Lilith the charming, Sophia the divine virgin or the beast from the animal world. They fail to see that the psychology of the woman has to account for all these archetypes and plenty others: the siren, the mother, Pallas Athena and many others. The base of female psychology, however, should never be humane. Because if the mystic theories and myths concerning the origin of the woman teach us something, it is that we should not and cannot understand the woman relying on the same background we use for the man.  A mere psychological point of view is unsuitable even when trying to understand the man, and with the woman it is completely futile. The so-called attribute theories tell me nothing about her. The woman is not a being; she is a set of beings. Pallas, Lilith, Mother, Siren, Sophia, Eve, the woman of the Idumean night, Anima.          

These beings are all present and alive at the same time in all women. These are the hidden possibilities of female existence. The forms and primeval germs of the existence and being of the female soul. The woman has probably passed through all these forms and contains them in herself. Jung would call these the archetypes of the female soul. But it must be pointed out here that what Jung calls an archetype is not yet a soul, but only the form of its earlier existence preserved in its memory. The archetype is a magical formula, which can be conjured up, but since it is the vestige of an existence long past, it is only a demon in the present soul and therefore it is boundlessly dangerous to conjure it up. Anyone who confuses such archetypes of the female soul, that is, not its components but its past forms of existence, with the woman herself calls forth this danger. Even Jung does this as much as he identifies the archetype with the woman, and so does everybody who considers, regards and understands the woman either as Eve, Lilith, Anima or Sophia.
                                                                                        

6.

 

I can object to whatever antique Hellenism created. I may for some reason not acknowledge their poetry, architecture, philosophy or their myths. I can say that this or that is better, more perfect, purer, warmer, truer and higher. But there is something I cannot object to. This is the Greek sculpture. Even if I do not acknowledge it. There is no more perfect, more human, purer and truer sculpture than the Greek one. Probably there will never be. For in all that Hellenism created there is something disturbing, doubtful, fake, aggressive. But not in sculpture. It is only the Greek sculpture that makes it possible for me to stand face to face with the divine man.         

Therefore I can object to whatever Hellenism created, but I must acknowledge Greek sculpture without any explanation. Other peoples, ages, times, races may have created a truer picture about the divine man in poetry, philosophy, in history or public affairs. In sculpture, once and for all, irrevocably and for good, the divine man has been understood and presented by Hellenism. The only subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man. All there is left to do is either to imitate or to admire, but nothing else.          

Many of the antique Greek sculptures depict a female figure, girl or Aphrodite who already stands naked with the sheet somewhere beside her, or is just undressing and something implies that she is preparing to take a bath. The pre-nuptial bath of the young woman is not at all an act of hygiene. If nothing else, the curious emphasis of representation proves the exceptional significance of the religious rite. It would be obvious to think that the young woman wants to give away her blossoming body to the first embrace clean. And indeed this would be the situation if the sculpture were not radiating a supernatural light. The Greek sculpture is never man, but always and in all cases, it is the divine man.          

Little children often believe that the stars are not luminous celestial bodies like the Sun, but little holes on the black curtain of the nocturnal sky, and through these holes shines the light of the hereafter. As if such holes had opened up on the sculptures of young women preparing for a bath, and as if these holes were the gateway to the supernatural world. Every sculpture is like a star. The act of undressing is symbolic and religious; taking off her clothes, not the cloth but the clothes that her real being wears, means taking off nature. She takes off, or washes off herself everything that is not her.      

   

So that the one who takes part in the embrace should be really her? This explanation misses the point. What this is about always goes back to the original idea. The subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man. The subject of the female sculpture is the divine woman. This sculpture is the divine woman. And when she undresses, this magical act is nothing else but the sculptor’s act of taking the human-material curtain off the woman; he lifts it up and shows the divine woman.     

    

This mystical bath is very similar to death, when the psyche leaves its clothes here and washes off everything that covers its real being. The dead have to be washed before they are delivered to the lord of the hereafter. This is the symbolic bath. Naturally, there would be no point in washing the dead body before burial to help it decompose. The pre-nuptial bath and the bath of the dead body is the mystical rite of melting off all sheets. And when the Greek girl takes the jug and leaves her clothes behind to take a bath she is perfectly naked, actually and truly, once in this whole human existence; she has taken off everything that is not her and has washed off of herself everything that does not belong to her being.          

This is the explanation for the supernatural light of these female sculptures; this is why it seems as if through the sculpture there had opened a little hole on the dark curtain of nature, and through this hole there shone some clear light. The Greek female sculpture depicts the moment when the woman washes nature off herself in her mystic bath and the glorious and divine psyche appears. The being who she really is, the one preparing for the nuptials, who takes part in the nuptials, who is touched by the man’s embrace? Is this why the sculpture is  glittering, is this why it is a star, is this why it seems as if through it we can look into the hereafter? No. The nuptials that the divine psyche is preparing for has nothing to do with the man’s arms. It does not have to do anything with it because this is not why the girl washes off nature and shows herself in her divine being. The meaning of the nuptial is something totally different. The bodiless, aerial psyche has taken off its clothes, the mystic liquid is there in the jar and it will wash off the hair, the flesh, the muscles, it will dissolve its form and nothing palpable remains of it. The glittering psyche shines in and through the sculpture. The profane and base eye, which is the eye of the modern man, does not understand this divine light which surpasses all ordinary beauty and shines through these sculptures. They interpret it as mastery, taste, knowledge or talent. Never has mastery, taste, knowledge or talent created anything which surpasses nature. What shines in these women is not the beauty of the material, form, charm or proportion. Probably it has nothing to do with beauty. The profane eye only sees a desirable woman. What is curious is that this woman is not at all desirable. This woman is the woman. This woman is the psyche, this psyche is the woman. This is the source of the woman. This is the origin.          

This is the opportunity to look into immaterial radiance, the hereafter, the eternal and heavenly light, from which the woman was born. This is the moment when one meets face to face with the divine origin of the woman. We should not forget that the only subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man, and the Greek girl is the divine woman.          

The charming and seductive form of the female body here is the form, means and material of expression, just like the marble. This is that cosmic and natural conventional sign which helps us understand what this is all about. But the sculpture itself is not of the body, as it is not of material, not of marble. The sculpture is of the psyche and it depicts the psyche at the moment when the woman in her mystic bath washes nature off herself and appears once in her life in her original and primeval being.          

According to Greek mythology every year the queen of the gods, Hera, bathes back her maidenhood in order to sacrifice it again and again to her husband Zeus. Goddess Hera knew that if she washes nature off herself and becomes psyche, she will again become the primeval woman, the primeval virgin; she will become virginal like light, like the stars. She will return to the source of womanhood, puts on herself the original form of the woman, her first being, and returns regenerated and glorified.
                                                                                        

7.          

The psyche which is depicted by the Greek marble girl is completely and perfectly different from the soul of the man. It is not its supplement, equivalent, not its negative, positive or half. The origin of the woman is perfectly different from that of the man; the psyche of the woman is different too. Some may like to call this psyche emotional. The woman is an emotional being because it does not think, concede; she just loves, hates, feels sympathy or antipathy, cries, laughs, grieves; fluctuates, changes, floats like the warm, cold, like sound, like feeling, like music. Some would like to believe that her main feature is not emotion but sensitivity because she reacts so quickly to everything that touches her and responds so finely as a flower. Sensitivity has nothing to do with sensuality or the senses; sensitivity is not a natural but a psyche feature. And the woman is able to become so fine but also so rough, become so noble but fall so deep because what she experiences affects her more fatefully.          

The basic feature of the female psyche is neither emotion nor sensitivity. Anyone can say that the man is thought, act, spirit or creation. Somehow, figuratively, this can be understood. Even if they would not guess the point, they would not totally miss it. If they say that the woman is an emotional or sensitive being, they would not even remotely touch upon the point. There is only one word which can signify and which does signify the female psyche, and this word is: woman. Nothing else. It cannot be understood in any other way, and there is no abstract meaning for this word, and one cannot talk about the woman in an abstract meaning. Which, of course, means that there are prior things in the fate of a man, things which all come before his sex. In womanhood sex is at the first place. But for the woman the idea that her sex is goal, fate and the absolute applies only as much as all the others: emotion  or sensitivity. The woman is much more than and different from merely her features. The word woman cannot be substituted by anything else. The woman cannot be abstracted or understood from the man, nature or the beast.          

There is a possible knowledge of the man. If we take into account only the lengthy volumes of modern characterology, we can say that this knowledge is considerable. But in the whole of characterology there is nothing referring to the woman. What is more, not even from the psychology of the literature of the whole world can I learn anything about the woman. The woman does not have a history, but a mythology, and so her psychology is much simpler. Which means it is more direct. Which, on the other hand, means that it is boundlessly more difficult.          

The brilliant star being and glittering psyche of the Greek marble girls knows this. There can be no mistake. I cannot consider a woman anyone but who is indeed a woman. And no woman can be considered anything else but a woman. This light, this blinding glare, this immaterial, bodiless being? this is the female psyche, so much so that if the sculptures disappeared and their form dissolved, even then nothing else could be said but: woman.
                                                                                        

8.           

To say that love is the unification of existence split into two is just as erroneous as it is to say that love is one and one. Love is not symmetrical. Most probably neither Swedenborg, nor Welkish, nor Jung is right when they think about the relationship between man and woman as symmetrical; that nothing special happens here, but what is told by the platonic myth; the two halves of a being meet again after they have been split into two as the result of the jealousy of the gods. The mystery of love is exactly the opposite: that the perfectly different man and the perfectly different woman, whose place in the world, origin, nature, form, aim, fate is totally foreign and different, these two asymmetrical beings meet and merge into each other. It is perhaps possible that in sex the animal world unites beings which are positioned symmetrically to the left and right, up and down, on the positive or negative side. But it is absolutely sure that with humans love unites worlds and beings which are totally different. Since, if it was merely the unification of two complementary forms, it would hardly fulfill that gripping wish rooted in the metaphysical depths of humans which everybody must experience, and if they do not experience this, they will be left poorer than a blind beggar. The unexpected miracle and unimaginable moment in the mystery of love is exactly that the ones who merge do not belong and have never belonged together. No one can find the explanation for love in nature; in nature there is only sex. For love to flare up divine intervention is needed; without this the beings and worlds so different from each other can never meet.
                                                                                        

9.         

The origin of love is surely different from that of sex. Love is the relationship between the divine woman and the divine man, and in this relationship two creatures who are totally different in their source, their time of origin, their metaphysical being, and who can never be equalled or reduced to the same denomination, meet and unite in the divine mystery. Sex, on the other hand, is the complementation of proportionate and symmetrical natural beings. Kant is right; only a man and a woman make a whole human being? In nature. In love the meeting of the divine man and the divine woman is not a whole, but more than that. It is as much more as God is more than nature. Man and woman uniting in love are the mystical merging of two creative psyches. From sex springs a new natural being, from love springs a new psyche. If two natural beings unite without love, then it is merely the unification of two natural beings. This is the case of the animal world? Perhaps. But there is love which is the meeting and merging of two psyches without sexual intercourse. This is the love which breeds the immaterial psyche.

Man confuses love and sex. Often he regards something which is merely sex as love, and thinks that, without exception, all love must end in sex. And man thinks that beings are created by sex. Beings are created by love, sex only adds the clothes, which are the burden and which need to be taken off anyway. Only two psyches can create, and this is love, which creates without sexual intercourse. When sex submerges and fades away, when the two psyches are swooped by the other’s divine being, when even the thought of any touch or approach seems dreadful and disgraceful, when the other, unfamiliar being lights a fire which strikes out of nature like lightening, that is the moment of begetting in the psyche-love.

Do not think that this moment is rare. Everybody, unless they have lived a life of oblivion, can remember passionate moments, alone in their room at night, or in the sun at noon in the forest, on a mountaintop, at sea, or on a summer afternoon lying in a sweet-scented orchard, when the divine woman was either at an unreachable distance or right there, it does not really matter, they got so enraptured that something burst out from them, and the woman, even if she was a hundred miles away, apprehended it and took it in.          

Those who have not experienced this moment of psyche-begetting and do not know that the girl is preparing for this act will understand nothing of the Greek sculpture of the divine girl. She steps into a mystic bath in order to dissolve off herself everything that would disrupt this nuptial of the psyche. More psyches are born from these invisible, supernatural acts than are humans from sex. And these psyches populate the divine world space ? the space whose light flashes through the marble girls, as if through little cracks on the dark curtain.
                                                                                        

10.          

The natural act of sex is totally independent of love. And when the first psyche used the meeting of the natural sperm and egg so that it can also appear, live and take its place in nature; this First Soul connected the divine psyche love with the sex of nature and with reproduction, this degraded love and immersed it in sex. Creation and reproduction are two different things.          

The confusion of love and sex is the unlawful unification of two processes which belong in two totally different worlds. It is curious that none of the three basic aspects of human knowledge, the genius, ancient myth or mystic intuition, has paid any attention to this most significant moment. Unlike to the consequences, which have been observed by many more and much more often. Since this unlawful unification there has existed in the love of both man and woman the fear of befouling each other. Christianity calls it the original sin, but that is only a name. Everybody knows about it even if they have not heard the name.      

   

In sex the meaning of the divine mystery of love grows dim and sex becomes the barrier to the unification of the two totally different world creators. Love and sex, the way man lives it, is a prohibited magical act which offers an opportunity for more and more creatures to use it as a way of breaking into nature. From the magic act only First Souls can be born, which means half elementary, half psyche beings. These are the creatures which ancient myth sees as fish girls, man horses, boys with goats’ feet and girls with birds’ feathers. The typical male character of the First Soul is the titan, and the corresponding female character is the siren.
                                                                                        

11.          

For the titan and the siren existence is a prey. They live in order to pillage joy in the world. This joy is always sensual, natural, material and physical. When the First Soul goes for either gold, power, glory, art, knowledge or the other sex, without exception, it always believes that it has to treasure up something, and thinks that this accumulation, this wealth is the joy, the pleasure. The First Soul lives in order to devour life, that is why it is sensual and like a predator.        

 

Whoever thinks that the relationship between the man and woman of today is that of a titan and a siren is wrong. The whole of Europe since the very beginning has known no other relationship between the man and the woman other than that of the titan and the siren. It is not without reason European love has been named Faustian. Faust is still a symbol; the old magician who betrays himself even to the evil in order just to be able to go for the siren’s sensual charms. This is the real European man, the mere titanic sex, that only sees pleasure in the other sex and considers it as a prey.   

      

All one has to do is watch when a European man looks at a woman; when he has a look at her. This looking is already touching. He seeks for pleasure. And the woman is virtually bathing in this look. And what happens here is just the opposite of the mystical bath: she bathes on herself all that the marble girl washes off.          

The question can be put: who is the ideal of man? Lilith, the siren, the seducer, whose being is unconsciousness, daze, drunkenness; it is exciting, enchanting, intoxicating; that is, charming? Nothing has woman ever meant here but what is the symbol of sensual delight. She is for robbing her off her charm then she can go to the cloister (Hamlet) or to prison (Faust). The woman is a siren. And she has become one. She is unworthy of her own divine origin, she is to her primeval beauty as parvenu to money; she considers it as capital which she lets for use ; she is the capitalist of beauty, the exploiter of her faculty. The divine woman has become mere matter in the hands of the sacrilegists, and dips the most irrational miracle of the world in the gutter, exchanges it for halfpennies and sells it at the fly infested marketplace. The siren is the woman who betrays her own divine psyche to matter.
                                                                                        

12.       

  

"Ce mal d’être deux," says Mallarmé. That is the marriage of modern man, where intimacy is replaced by routine, and sincerity by unchastity. This is the dread of being two, always disturbed, aroused, irritated, mocked, jabbed, stung by insects, wounded and tainted with looks and thoughts. Marriage: to tie the titan and the siren together, who after a few weeks’ gross orgy find themselves satiated and want to tear apart with all their strength.       

  

That is then what they call disappointment. When the titan and the siren realise that they have robbed what they could, they want to escape, they want new prey. They think and say that they have not found what they were looking for. It is natural. What they were looking for is nowhere. They wanted satisfaction. But they cannot satisfy each other. There is no satisfaction in the world of the First Soul. There is only gross insensibility there.        

 

When they get tired and they have to stay together, then comes neurasthenia: "Ce mal d’être deux," this is the dread of being two. They cannot stay balanced, clean, serene, clear on their own any more. In every hour of every day they give and receive venomous stabs. And then one breaks out and staggers to another woman; then the other breaks out and comes at another man. But, since they look for and demand the same, they get the same.    

     

They think that there is a man or woman somewhere they will not be disappointed in, who will satisfy them and with whom they will be happy. Of course, by happiness they mean the prolongation of sensual delights into infinity. Some think they have made the wrong choice and missed the real one. They try a new one. But they see, get and live the same. Because they expect, demand and wish for the same. It never occurs to them that it is not another man or woman they should want; what could and should be wanted is different, that is quite different. It is not delight and satisfaction. As long as they want this, after a while they necessarily experience: "Ce mal d’être deux," the dreadful experience of being two. Love is not pleasure and not happiness, it is not delight, fun or sensuality. And marriage is even less so.
                                                                                        

13.          

According to the myth the first man lived together with Lilith. Lilith, the lover. The siren, the woman of sensual delights, the mere sex-woman. But the first man got bored with her and sent her away. Then came Eve, the wife.  

      

This is the beginning of marriage. The basis of marriage is totally different from that of sex. The basis of marriage is the psyche-love.        

 

There are two beings needed for sex: the titan and the siren. Nothing else. That is enough. In order for marriage to happen, besides the two beings it is also necessary to have the approval of the Powers. Never and nowhere on earth has any people lived who did not know that for marriage they needed divine approval and consecration. Sex is always unlawful. That is why it hides under bushes, into woods, dark streets and filthy back rooms. Marriage is lawful. It dwells clearly, it is publicly beautiful and proud. One can only become a husband or wife in higher consecration. Not even love is enough. Not only because there is no pure love, but also because love becomes pure as a result of the consent of the divine forces. No kind of love, not even the deepest and most passionate one should be confused with marriage. The act of marriage takes place not in the natural world but in the psyche world. Two psyches marry each other. Now it is getting clearer what the mystic bath of the Greek girl means.          

Today in our profane times this sounds like cheap moralising. The civil marriage is when the state audaciously substitutes itself for God and feels authorised to marry people. This act is the official permission for defloration.          

It is official but not lawful. It is not in front of the state or the authorities that marriage becomes lawful. But even in our age one can feel that the relationship of man and woman cannot stand on its own. There needs to be a higher agency, and it is only through this that they can meet. The encroachment of the authorities into this higher agency is impudence. Because the point of marriage is not that a permission is necessary. No. The point of marriage is that it has to be done in a higher world. Only in God can, may and should two people meet, unite and live. Against which there is no better example than the profane marriage of the modern man. Living together will not even accidentally be successful, and it is only the source of endless agony, unhappiness and horror. "Ce mal d’être deux." Of course, we are not talking about the marriage of convenience here. In marriages of convenience the fact that the marriage has taken place not in the higher world but in matter appears unbashfully. But the marriage of sex is nothing else but an extreme case of the marriage of convenience: this is just the same a meeting from below and the meeting only of the lower parts. The condition of meeting and uniting exists only up above; above man. Marriage is not a physical but a metaphysical relationship, just as the marble girl says when she washes off of herself matter before her nuptials and prepares to step before the Powers so as to be initiated into the mystery by the divine hand.
                                                                                        

14.          

In marriage two processes of unification take place at the same time; only a man and a woman make a whole.          

This act is called reintegration; it is the restitution of the unity of the ancient human personality. The other unification is infinitely more important and essential; this is not the meeting of the two parts but the mystical merging and creative movement of the two psyche worlds by divine touch. This marriage is not reintegration but divination. It is not the restitution of unity but it is deification. In this man and woman do not reproduce but create, or in other words, take part in divine creation. The other sex is there so that divination can take place. That is why there is the man for the woman, and the woman for the man. The perfectly and completely different beings and worlds. They have to enter this strange and different world, and they have to leave themselves there and submerge in the other element. This is love. This forgetting about myself and melting into the other. The condition of complete self-surrender exists only in the other sex. I can keep myself in all of my deeds and thoughts, in every incident of my life. But not in love: here I have to give myself up completely.          

That is why beings that are tied to their Selves, titans and sirens, cannot love. I cannot give myself up in a way that I get myself back. The one I get back is not the one I was. It is more, richer, simpler, purer and more divine.          

That is the secret of love. I have to get lost and I have to perish. And Barth says: perishing means not only a little, but completely. Without cancellation, consideration, condition or caution. In the mystery only two beings that have perfectly perished can partake in deification.
                                                                                        

15.         

In the correspondence of Heloïse and Abélard the immortal anonymous author depicted the moment when the love of the two beings, the male Abélard and the female Heloïse, takes sex off itself, like the Greek girls take off nature, and they unite in the mystery of the psyche love. This is the only fulfilled and happy love of the history of the world. Bold, unrealisable and impossible, but this is the commanding and imperative and the only true love. What he says is not an illustration, example, teaching or theory; similarly, it does not want money, fame, it does not set laws nor asks to follow. That is how he discussed it with himself and God. And that is so.

Translated from Hungarian by Péter Simon