The lines on which your eye falls first were written last. My intention with them is to attempt once again to compress into the form of a letter the extended exploration that is hereby transmitted to you. These lines correspond to the last lines and together form an envelope, and thus in an external way they evince what the internal evidence will in many ways convince you of—that it is a letter you are reading. This thought—that it was a letter I wrote to you—I have been unwilling to give up, partly because my time has not permitted the more painstaking elaboration that a treatise requires, and partly because I am reluctant to miss the opportunity of addressing you in the more admonishing and urgent tone appropriate to the epistolary form. You are all too skilled in the art of talking in generalities about everything without letting yourself be personally involved for me to tempt you by setting your dialectical powers in motion. You know how the prophet Nathan dealt with King David when he presumed to understand the parable the prophet had told him but was unwilling to understand that it applied to him. Then to make sure, Nathan added: You are the man, O King.2 In the same way I also have continually tried to remind you that you are the one who is being discussed and you are the one who is spoken to. Therefore, I do not at all doubt that while reading you will continually have the impression that it is a letter you are reading, even if you might be deflected by the fact that the format of the paper is inappropriate for a letter. As a public official, I am accustomed to writing on full sheets; this can perhaps have its good side if it can contribute to giving my words a certain official quality in your [II 6] eyes. The letter that you hereby receive is rather long; if it were weighed on a post office scale, it would be an expensive letter; on the troy-weight scale of keen critical analysis, it would perhaps appear to be very negligible. I ask you, therefore, not to use any of these scales, not the post office scale, for it comes to you not for forwarding but as a deposit, and not the scale of critical analysis, since I would be loath to see you make yourself guilty of such a gross and uncongenial misunderstanding.
3If anyone other than you were to see this exploration, he would certainly find it most curious and superfluous; if he were a married man, he would perhaps exclaim with a certain paterfamilias-joviality: Yes, marriage is the esthetic in life; if he were a young man, he would perhaps chime in rather vaguely and unreflectively: Yes, love, you are the esthetic in life; but both of them would be unable to comprehend how it could ever enter my head to want to salvage the esthetic prestige of marriage. Indeed, rather than earning me the gratitude of actual or prospective husbands, it would probably make me suspect, for he who champions accuses. And for this I would have you to thank, for I have never had any doubts about it, you whom I love as a son, as a brother, as a friend, despite all your bizarre qualities, love with an esthetic love [Kjærlighed], because some day you perhaps will find a center for your eccentric behavior, you whom I love for your intensity, for your passions, for your frailties, love with the fear and trembling of a religious love because I see the aberrations and because to me you are something entirely different from a prodigy. When I see you swerve, see you rear like a wild horse, plunge backward and dash forward again, then, well, then I abstain from all paltry pedagogics, but I do think of an unbroken horse and also see the hand that holds the reins, see the harsh fates’ lash raised over your head. And yet when this discussion eventually comes into your hands, you will perhaps say: Yes, it is indisputably an enormous task he has undertaken, but now let us also see how he has carried it out. Perhaps I speak too mildly to you, perhaps I tolerate too much from you, perhaps I [II 7] should have exercised more the authority that I, despite your pride, have over you, or perhaps I should not have become involved with you in this matter at all, for you are indeed a corrupted person in many ways, and the more one is involved with you the worse it becomes. That is, you are no enemy of marriage, but you misuse your ironic look and your sarcastic taunting to ridicule it.
In this connection, I concede that you are not shadow-boxing, that you land some solid blows, and that you are keenly observant, but I also want to say that this is perhaps your error. Your life will amount to nothing but tentative efforts at living. You presumably will answer that this is always better than traveling on the train of triviality and atomistically losing oneself in life’s social hordes.4 To repeat, you cannot be said to hate marriage; as yet your thought has never actually gone that far, at least not without being scandalized by it, and so you must forgive me for assuming that you have not given full consideration to the subject. What you prefer is the first infatuation. You know how to sink down and hide in a dreaming, love-drunk clairvoyance. You completely envelop yourself, as it were, in the sheerest cobweb and then sit in wait. But you are not a child, not an awakening consciousness,5 and therefore your look has another meaning; but you are satisfied with it. You love the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy. You who always pride yourself on being an observateur must, in return, put up with becoming an object of observation.
I will remind you of an incident. A pretty young girl whom you by chance (this, of course, must be emphasized; you knew neither her social position nor her name, age, etc.) sat beside at table was too cool to bestow a glance upon you. You were momentarily perplexed as to whether this was merely Sprödigkeit6 [coyness] or whether together with it there was a little embarrassment, which properly illuminated could place her in an interesting situation. She sat directly opposite a mirror in which you could see her. She cast a shy glance in that direction without suspecting that your eyes had already taken quarters there; she blushed when your eyes met hers. You preserve such things as accurately and as swiftly as a daguerreotype, which, as is generally known, takes only a half-minute even in the poorest weather.
Ah, you are a strange fellow, one moment a child, the next [II 8] an old man; one moment you are thinking most earnestly about the most important scholarly problems, how you will devote your life to them, and the next you are a lovesick fool. But you are a long way from marriage, and I hope that your good genius will keep you from taking the wrong path, for at times I seem to see in you traces of wanting to play a little Zeus. You are so superior about your love that I daresay you fancy that every girl would count herself lucky to be your sweetheart for one week. And now you may resume for the time being your amorous studies, along with your esthetic, ethical, metaphysical, cosmopolitan, and other studies. One cannot really become angry with you; evil in you, like the Middle Ages’ concept of it, has a certain additive of good nature and childishness. As far as marriage is concerned, your relation has always been only that of an observer. There is something treasonable in wanting to be merely an observer. How often you entertained me—yes, I readily admit it—but how often you also tormented me with your stories of how you had stolen your way into the confidence of one and then another married man in order to see how deeply bogged down he was in the swamp of marital life. You are really very gifted at slipping in with people; that I will not deny, nor that it is very entertaining to hear you relate the consequences of it and to witness your hilarity every time you are able to peddle a really fresh observation. But, to be honest, your psychological interest is not in earnest and is more a hypochondriacal inquisitiveness.
But now to the subject. There are two things that I must regard as my particular task: to show the esthetic meaning of marriage and to show how the esthetic in it may be retained despite life’s numerous hindrances. In order, however, that you may yield with all the more confidence to the upbuilding that the reading of this little essay can possibly provide you, I always have at the outset a little polemical prologue in which appropriate consideration will be given to your sarcastic observations. But by doing that I also hope to pay appropriate tribute to the pirate cities7 and then be able to settle down calmly to my calling, for I am still within my calling, I who, myself a married man, battle on behalf of marriage—pro aris et focis [on behalf of our altars and hearths].8 I assure you that this subject is so much on my mind that I, who ordinarily feel only [II 9] slightly tempted to write books, actually could be tempted to do that if I dared to hope I could save just one single marriage from the hell into which it has perhaps plunged itself or to make a few people more competent to realize the most beautiful task given to a human being.
To be on the safe side, I shall occasionally draw upon my wife and my relation to her, not as if I presumed to represent our marriage as an instance of the norm, but partly because those poetic descriptions seized out of the air usually do not have much convincing power and partly because I consider it is of importance for me to show that it is possible to preserve the esthetic even in everyday life. You have known me for many years; you have known my wife for five. You consider her rather beautiful, exceptionally charming, which I do, too. I know very well, however, that she is not as beautiful in the morning as in the evening, that a certain touch of sadness, almost of ailment, disappears only later in the day, and that it is forgotten by evening when she truly can claim to be appealing. I know very well that her nose is not flawlessly beautiful and that it is too small, but it nevertheless pertly faces the world, and I know that this little nose has provided the occasion for so much teasing that even if it were within my competence I would never wish her one more beautiful. This attaches a much more profound significance to the accidental in life than that which you are so enthusiastic about. I thank God for this good and forget the weak side.
Yet this is of lesser importance, but there is one thing for which I thank God with my whole soul, and that is that she is the only one I have ever loved, the first, and there is one thing for which I pray to God with my whole heart, that he will give me the strength never to want to love any other. This is a family devotion, in which she also shares, because every feeling, every mood, gains a higher meaning for me by having her share in it. All feelings, even the highest religious ones, can take on a certain indolence if one is always alone with them. In her presence, I am simultaneously priest and congregation. And if I sometimes should become unloving enough not to keep this good in mind, uncouth enough not to give thanks for it, she will remind me of it. You see, my young friend, this is not the flirting of the first days of infatuation, not a venture in the imaginary erotic, for example, asking himself and the beloved, as almost everyone does during the engagement period, the question whether she has been in love before, or whether [II 10] he himself has ever loved anyone before, but this is the earnestness of life, and yet it is not cold, unbeautiful, unerotic, unpoetic. I truly do feel keenly that she really loves me and that I really love her, not as if over the years our marriage has not attained just as much stability as that of most other people, but it still gives me joy to rejuvenate continually our first love, and in such a way, furthermore, that it has for me just as much religious as esthetic meaning, for God has not become so supramundane for me that he does not concern himself about the covenant he himself has established between man and woman, and I have not become so spiritual that the worldly aspect of life has no meaning for me. All the beauty implicit in the erotic of paganism has its validity in Christianity insofar as it can be combined with marriage. This rejuvenation of our first love is not just a sad looking back or a poetic recollecting of past experience, whereby one is finally enmeshed—all that kind of thing is exhausting—it is an action. After all, the time when one must be satisfied with recollecting comes soon enough; the fresh wellspring of life ought to be kept open as long as possible.
You, however, actually live by plundering; unnoticed, you creep up on people, steal from them their happy moment, their most beautiful moment, stick this shadow picture in your pocket as the tall man did in Schlemihl9 and take it out whenever you wish. You no doubt say that those involved lose nothing by this, that often they themselves perhaps do not know which is their most beautiful moment. You believe that they should rather be indebted to you, because with your study of the lighting, with magic formulas, you permitted them to stand forth transfigured in the supernatural amplitude of the rare moments. Perhaps they lose nothing thereby, and yet there is the question whether it is not conceivable that they retain a recollection of them that is always painful to them. But you do lose; you lose your time, your serenity, your patience for living, because you yourself know very well how impatient you are, you who once wrote to me that patience to bear life’s burdens must indeed be an extraordinary virtue, that you did not even have the patience to want to live.10 Your life disintegrates into nothing but interesting details like these. If one dared to hope that the energy that kindles you in such moments could take shape in you, distribute itself coherently over [II 11] your life, well, then something great would certainly come of you, for you yourself are transfigured in such moments.
There is a restlessness in you over which consciousness nevertheless hovers, bright and clear; your whole soul is concentrated upon this single point, your understanding contrives a hundred plans; you arrange everything for the attack, but it miscarries at a single point, and then your almost diabolical dialectic is instantly ready to explain what happened in such a way that it will benefit the new plan of operation. You continually hover over yourself, and no matter how crucial each step, you always keep for yourself a possibility of interpretation that with one word can change everything. Then, in addition, a total incarnation of mood. Your eyes sparkle, or, more correctly, they seem to radiate like a hundred searching eyes at once; a vagrant touch of color crosses your face; you rely confidently on your calculations, and yet you wait with a terrible impatience—yes, my dear friend, when all is said and done, I do believe that you are deceiving yourself, that all this that you tell about catching a man in his happy moment is only your own rare mood that you grasp. You are so intensified that you are creative. This is why I did not think it was very harmful for others; for you it is thoroughly harmful. Is there not indeed some enormous faithlessness underlying this? Presumably you will say that people are no concern of yours, that instead they ought to be grateful that you, by your touch, do not, as Circe did, change them into swine11 but rather from swine into heroes. You say it would be an entirely different matter if someone really took you into his confidence, but as yet you have never met such a person. Your heart is touched; you melt in fervent emotion at the thought that you would sacrifice everything for him. I do not deny you a certain good-natured helpfulness, for example, that the way you help the needy is truly beautiful, that there is something noble about the gentleness you manifest at times, but in spite of that I believe this also conceals a kind of aristocratic exclusiveness.
I shall not remind you of specific eccentric expressions of this; it would be a pity in this way to obscure totally the good that may be in you, but I do want to remind you of a little incident in your life that can be brought up without being detrimental to you. You once told me that on a walk you were behind two poor women. My description of the situation at [II 12] this moment perhaps does not have the animation that yours had when you rushed up to me, totally absorbed by this idea. The two women were from the workhouse. They perhaps had known better days but this was forgotten, and the workhouse is not exactly the place where hope is loved forth. One of them, taking and offering the other a pinch of snuff, said: Oh, if only I had five rix-dollars!12 She herself perhaps was amazed at this bold wish, which, of course, like the others echoed unanswered across the embankments. You approached; you had already taken out your wallet and had removed a five-rix-dollar bank note before you made the crucial step, so that the situation would keep the appropriate tension and so that she would not prematurely suspect something. You approached with an almost obsequious courtesy, as befits a serving spirit; you gave her the five rix-dollars and vanished. You were tickled pink over the thought of what an impression it would make on her, whether she would see a divine providence in it or whether her mind, which through much suffering had already developed a certain defiance, would instead turn almost with contempt against the divine governance that here assumed the character of chance. You recounted that this provided you with the occasion to ponder whether the altogether accidental fulfillment of such an accidentally expressed wish could bring a person to despair, because the reality [Realitet]13 of life was negated at its deepest root. So what you wanted was to play the role of fate; what actually thrilled you was the multiplicity of reflections that could be woven out of this. I readily admit to you that you are well qualified to play the role of fate, insofar as this word combines the conception of the most unstable and most capricious of all; as for me, I am readily satisfied with a less distinctive appointment in life.14 Moreover, in this event you can see an example that perhaps can throw some light for you on the extent to which your imaginative ventures have a harmful effect on people. You seem to have the advantage on your side; you have given a poor woman five rix-dollars, fulfilled her most extravagant wish, and yet you yourself acknowledge that this could just as well have the effect upon her that she, as Job’s wife advised him to do, would curse God.15 You probably will say that these consequences were not in your power and that if one were to calculate the consequences in this way one would not act at all. But I shall answer: Of course, one can act. If I had had five rix-dollars, I perhaps [II 13] would also have given them to her, but I would also have been conscious that I was not involved in an experiment; I would have persisted in the conviction that divine providence, whose humble instrument I felt myself to be at that moment, would certainly guide everything for the best and that I would have had nothing for which to reproach myself.
How insecure and suspended your life is you can ascertain also from your unsureness whether at some time it will weigh heavily upon you that your hypochondriacal keenness and sophistry may bewitch you into a cycle of consequences from which you will try in vain to extricate yourself, and that you will set heaven and earth in motion to find the poor woman again in order to observe what effect it has had upon her, “as well as the best way in which she ought to be influenced,” for you always remain the same and never become wiser. Passionate as you are, it was no doubt possible that you, with your passionateness, could decide to forget your great plans, your studies—in short, that everything could become a matter of indifference for you in comparison with the idea of finding that poor woman, who very likely would be long since dead and gone. In this way, you seek to remedy what you have done wrong, and thus your life-task becomes so contentious in itself that one can say that you simultaneously want to be fate and our Lord, a task that our Lord himself cannot carry out, for he is only the one. The zeal you display may very well be praiseworthy, but do you not nevertheless perceive how your zeal makes it more and more clear that what you lack, altogether lack, is faith. Instead of saving your soul by entrusting everything to God, instead of taking this shortcut, you prefer the endless roundabout way, which perhaps will never take you to your destination. You very likely will say: Well, if things are like that, one never needs to act—to which I will answer: Of course, if you are convinced that you have a place in the world that belongs to you, where you ought to concentrate all your activity; but to act as you are doing certainly borders on madness. You will say that even if you folded your hands and let God take care of things, the woman very likely would not be helped—to which I would answer: Very possibly, but you would be helped and the woman also if she likewise entrusted herself to God. Do you not see that if you really put on your traveling boots and wandered out in the world and wasted your time and your energy, then you would miss out on all other activity, something that perhaps would also [II 14] torment you later. But to repeat—this capricious existence of yours, is it not faithlessness? It certainly does seem in casu [in this case] that by wandering all over the world to find the poor woman you would demonstrate an exceptional degree of faithfulness, for there was indeed not the least egotism that moved you; it was not the same as when a lover searches for the beloved; no, it was pure sympathy. I will answer: You certainly should beware of calling that feeling egotism, but it is your usual rebellious insolence. You scorn everything that is established by divine or human laws, and in order to be free of it you snatch at the accidental, which in this case is a poor woman unknown to you. With regard to your sympathy, it very likely was pure sympathy—for your experiment. On all sides, you forget that your existence in the world cannot possibly be calculated solely on the basis of the accidental, and the moment you make this the primary factor, you completely forget what you owe to those closest to you. I know very well that you are not lacking the sophistic shrewdness for glossing over or the ironic adroitness for playing down; therefore you presumably will answer: I am not so haughty as to fancy myself to be one who can act for the whole—that I leave to the distinguished; if I can act just for some particular thing I am content. But basically this is an outrageous lie, for you do not want to act at all; you want to experiment, and you regard everything from this point of view, with the utmost effrontery. Action is always the object of your ridicule, as you once said of a man who had met his death in a ludicrous manner—something you reveled in for many days—that otherwise nothing was known of the significance of his life on the whole, but now it could be said of him that he truly had not lived in vain.16
To repeat, what you want to be is—fate. Pause a moment now. I do not intend to preach to you, but there is an earnestness for which I know you have even an unusually deep respect, and anyone who has sufficient power to call it forth in you or sufficient faith in you to let it manifest itself in you will, I know, see in you a quite different person. Imagine, to take the supreme example, imagine that the almighty source of everything, that God in heaven set himself up merely as a riddle for men and would let the whole human race drift in this horrible uncertainty—would there not be something in your innermost being that would rebel against this, would you at any moment be able to endure this torment, or would you at [II 15] any moment be able to bring your thought to grasp this horror! Yet he might almost say—if I dare use these proud words: Of what concern is man to me? But that is why it is not this way at all, and when I declare that God is incomprehensible, my soul raises itself up to the highest; it is precisely in my most blissful moments that I say it—incomprehensible, because his love is incomprehensible—incomprehensible, because his love passes all understanding.17 Said about God, this signifies the highest; when one is obliged to say it about a human being, it always signifies a defect, at times a sin. And Christ did not regard it robbery to be equal with God but humbled himself,18 and you want to regard the intellectual gifts bestowed upon you as a robbery.
Just consider, your life is passing; for you, too, the time will eventually come even to you when your life is at an end, when you are no longer shown any further possibilities in life, when recollection alone is left, recollection, but not in the sense in which you love it so much, this mixture of fiction and truth, but the earnest and faithful recollection of your conscience. Beware that it does not unroll a list for you—presumably not of actual crimes but of wasted possibilities, shadow pictures it will be impossible for you to drive away. You are still young: The intellectual agility you possess is very becoming to youth and diverts the eye for a time. We are astonished to see a clown whose joints are so loose that all the restraints of a man’s gait and posture are annulled. You are like that in an intellectual sense; you can just as well stand on your head as on your feet. Everything is possible for you, and you can surprise yourself and others with this possibility, but it is unhealthy, and for your own peace of mind I beg you to watch out lest that which is an advantage to you end by becoming a curse. Any man who has a conviction cannot at his pleasure turn himself and everything topsy-turvy in this way. Therefore I do not warn you against the world but against yourself and the world against you. This much is certain: If I had a daughter of such an age that there could be any possibility of her being influenced by you, I would strongly warn her, especially if she were also highly intelligent. And would there not be grounds for warning against you, since I—who nevertheless fancy that [II 16] I may match you, if not in agility at least in stability and steadfastness, if not in capriciousness and brilliance then at least in constancy—since I actually at times with a certain reluctance feel that you dazzle me, that I let myself be carried away by your exuberance, by the seemingly good-natured wittiness with which you mock everything, let myself be carried away into the same esthetic-intellectual intoxication in which you live? That is no doubt why I feel a certain degree of unsureness toward you, since I am at times too severe, at times too indulgent. Yet it is not so strange, for you are the epitome of any and every possibility, and therefore at times one must see in you the possibility of your damnation, at times of your salvation. You pursue every mood, every idea, good or bad, happy or sad, to its outermost limit, but in such a way that it happens more in abstracto than in concreto, so that this pursuit is itself more a mood, from which nothing more results than a knowledge of it, but not so much that it becomes easier or harder for you the next time to surrender to the same mood, for you continually retain the possibility of it. This is why one can almost reproach you for everything and for nothing at all, for it is and yet is not in you. You acknowledge or do not acknowledge, according to the circumstances, having had such a mood, but you are impervious to any attribution of responsibility; for you the point is whether you have had the mood fully, with proper pathos.
It was, as indicated, the esthetic significance of marriage I wished to consider. This might seem to be a superfluous exploration, to be something anyone would concede, since it has been pointed out often enough. Over the centuries have not knights and adventurers experienced incredible toil and trouble in order finally to find quiet peace in a happy marriage; over the centuries have not writers and readers of novels labored through one volume after the other in order to end with a happy marriage, and has not one generation after the other again and again faithfully endured four acts of troubles and entanglements if only there was any probability of a happy marriage in the fifth act? But through these enormous efforts very little is accomplished for the glorification of marriage, and I doubt very much that any person by reading such books has felt himself made competent to fulfill the task he has set for himself or has felt himself oriented in life, for precisely this is [II 17] the corruption, the unhealthiness in these books, that they end where they should begin. Having overcome the numerous adversities, the lovers finally fall into each other’s arms, the curtain falls, the book ends; but the reader is no wiser, for it really is no great art, provided that love in its first flash is present, to have the courage and ingenuity to battle with all one’s might for the possession of that good that one regards as the one and only, but on the other hand it certainly takes self-control, wisdom, and patience to overcome the exhaustion that often is wont to follow a fulfilled desire. In the first flash of love, it quite naturally thinks it cannot suffer troubles enough in order to gain possession of the beloved object—indeed, insofar as the dangers are not present, it is inclined to procure such dangers itself merely in order to conquer them. The full attention of this tendency is turned on this, and as soon as the dangers are conquered, the stage manager knows all about it. This is why one seldom sees a wedding or reads about it, except insofar as the opera and ballet have made a provision for this element, which presumably can provide the occasion for some dramatic nonsense or other, for magnificent pageantry, for significant gestures and heavenward glances on the part of a dancer, for the exchange of rings, etc. That which is true in this whole development, the genuinely esthetic, is that love is situated in striving, that this feeling is seen to be battling its way through an opposition. The defect is that this battle, this dialectic, is completely external and that love emerges from this battle just as abstract as when it entered into it. As soon as the idea of love’s proper dialectic awakens, the idea of its pathological struggle, of its relation to the ethical, the religious, then in truth there will be no need for hardhearted fathers or maiden bowers or enchanted princesses or trolls and monsters in order to give love an opportunity to show how much it can do. In our day, we seldom encounter such cruel fathers or such horrible monsters, and therefore insofar as modern literature has patterned itself on past literature, it actually is money that has become the medium of opposition through which love moves, and so we again drudge through four acts if there are sound prospects that a rich uncle may die in the fifth.
The occasions when one sees such performances are, however, rare, and on the whole modern literature is totally occupied with ridiculing love in the abstract immediacy in which it is found in the world of the regular novel. For example, in examining [II 18] Scribe’s dramatic works, we find that one of his main themes is that love is an illusion. But I need merely remind you of this; you have far too much sympathy for Scribe and his polemic. At least I believe that you would make that claim against the whole world, even though you would reserve knightly love for yourself, for you are so far from being devoid of feeling that when it comes to feelings you are the most jealous person I know. I recall that you once sent me a little review of Scribe’s The First Love19 that was written with almost desperate enthusiasm. In it, you claimed that it was the best Scribe had ever written and that this piece alone, properly understood, was sufficient to make him immortal. I would like to mention another piece that, in my opinion, again shows the defect in that which Scribe substitutes. It is For Eternity.20 Here he is ironic about a first love. With the aid of a shrewd mother, who is also a fine lady of the world, a new love is inaugurated, which she regards as reliable, but the spectator, who is unwilling to be satisfied that the author has quite arbitrarily put a period here, readily perceives that a third love could just as well come along. On the whole, it is remarkable how devouring modern poetry is and how it has lived all this time on love. Our age reminds one very much of the disintegration of the Greek state; everything continues, and yet there is no one who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond that gives it validity has vanished, and thus the whole age is simultaneously comic and tragic, tragic because it is perishing, comic because it continues, for it is still always the incorruptible that bears the corruptible, the intellectual-spiritual that bears the physical, and if it were possible to imagine that an inanimate body could still perform the usual functions for a little while, it would be comic and tragic in the same way. But just let the age go on devouring, and the more it devours of the substantial content that was intrinsic to romantic love, the greater the terror, when there is no more pleasure in this annihilation, with which it will eventually become conscious of what it has lost and in despair feel its misfortune.
We shall now see whether our age, which has annihilated romantic love, has been successful in substituting something better. But first I shall indicate the characteristics of romantic love. One could say in a single word: It is immediate. To see [II 19] her and to love her would be one and the same, or even though she saw him but one single time through a crack in the shuttered window of a virgin’s bower, she nevertheless would love him from that moment, him alone in the whole world. At this point, by prearrangement, I really ought to make room for some polemical effusions in order to promote in you the secretion of gall that is a necessary condition for a sound and beneficial appropriation of what I have to say. But for two reasons I cannot decide to do this: partly because romantic love is rather overworked these days and, to be honest, it is inconceivable that in this respect you want to move with the current since ordinarily you are always against it, and partly because I actually have preserved a certain faith in the truth of it, a certain respect for it, a certain sadness because of it. Therefore I mention only the watchword for your polemic on this score, the title of a little article of yours, “Empfindsame [Sensitive] and Incomprehensible Sympathies, or Two Hearts’ harmonia præstabilita [pre-established harmony].”21 What we are speaking of here is what Goethe in Wahlverwandtschaften22 has so artistically first intimated to us in the imagery of nature in order to make it real [realisere] later in the world of spirit, except that Goethe endeavored to motivate this drawing power through a series of factors (perhaps in order to show the difference between the life of the spirit and the life of nature) and has not emphasized the haste, the enamored impatience and determination with which the two affinities seek each other. And is it not indeed beautiful to imagine that two beings are intended for each other! How often do we not have an urge to go beyond the historical consciousness, a longing, a homesickness for the primeval forest that lies behind us, and does not this longing acquire a double significance when it joins to itself the conception of another being whose home is also in that region? Therefore, every marriage, even one that is entered into after sober consideration, has an urge, at least in particular moments, to imagine such a foreground. And how beautiful it is that the God who is spirit also loves the earthly love. That there is much lying among married people on this score, I readily admit to you, and that your observations along this line have frequently amused me, but the truth in it ought not to be forgotten. Perhaps someone thinks it is better to have complete authority in the choice of “one’s life-partner,” but such an expression as that betrays an extreme narrowness of mind and foolish self-importance of understanding and has no [II 20] intimation that in its genius [Genialitet] romantic love is free and that precisely this genius constitutes its greatness.
Romantic love manifests itself as immediate by exclusively resting in natural necessity. It is based on beauty, partly on sensuous23 beauty, partly on the beauty that can be conceived through and in and with the sensuous, yet not in such a way that it becomes visible through deliberation, but in such a way that, continually on the point of manifesting itself, it peeks out through it. Although this love is based essentially on the sensuous, it nevertheless is noble by virtue of the consciousness of the eternal that it assimilates, for it is this that distinguishes all love [Kjærlighed] from lust [Vellyst]: that it bears a stamp of eternity. The lovers are deeply convinced that in itself their relationship is a complete whole that will never be changed. But since this conviction is substantiated only by a natural determinant, the eternal is based on the temporal and thereby cancels itself. Since this conviction has undergone no ordeal, has found no higher justification, it proves to be an illusion and therefore it is so easy to make it ludicrous. But one should not be so ready to do this, and in modern comedy it is truly disgusting to see these experienced, scheming, silly women who know that love is an illusion. I know no creature so abominable as such a woman. To me no debauchery is so disgusting, and nothing is so revolting to me as to see an amorous young girl in the hands of such a person. It is in truth more terrible than to imagine her in the hands of a club of seducers. It is sad to see a man who has eliminated everything essential in life, but to see a woman on this wrong path is horrible. But, as stated, romantic love has an analogy to the moral [Sædelige]24 in the presumed eternity, which ennobles it and saves it from the merely sensuous. That is, the sensuous is momentary. The sensuous seeks momentary satisfaction, and the more refined the sensuous is, the better it knows how to make the moment of enjoyment into a little eternity. Therefore, the true eternity in love, which is the true morality, actually rescues it first out of the sensuous. But to bring forth this true eternity requires a determination of will—but more on that later.
Our age has discerned the weakness in romantic love very well; indeed, at times its ironic polemic against it has been [II 21] really amusing. Whether it has remedied the defect and what it has substituted in its place, we shall now see. One can say that it has taken two directions, one of which at first glance appears to be a wrong way, that is, immoral; the other one, which is more respectable, nevertheless, in my opinion, misses out on what is more profound in love. If, then, love depends upon the sensuous, anyone easily discerns that this immediate, chivalrous faithfulness is foolishness. No wonder, then, that women wish to be emancipated—in our day one of the many unbeautiful phenomena of which the men are guilty. The eternal in love becomes the object of ridicule; the temporal is retained, but the temporal is also refined in a sensuous eternity, in the eternal moment of the embrace. What I am saying here does not apply only to some seducer prowling about in the world like a beast of prey. No, it fits a goodly chorus of often highly gifted people, and it is not only Byron who declares that love is heaven and marriage hell.25
It is plain to see that there is some reflection here, something that romantic love does not have. This can readily take marriage in addition, and take the Church’s blessing as one more beautiful celebration, except that as such this nevertheless does not essentially have meaning for it. By reason of that reflection, the love mentioned, with a callousness and a terrible inflexibility of understanding, has invented a new definition of what unhappy love is—namely,26 to be loved when one no longer loves—it is not to love without having one’s love returned. If this attitude really understood the profundity that lies in these few words, it would shrink from them itself, because, in addition to all the experience, sagacity, and refinement, they also contain an intimation that there is a conscience. Consequently, the instant becomes the main thing, and how often have these brazen words been heard from that kind of a lover to the unhappy girl who could love only once: I do not ask for so much, I am satisfied with less; far be it from me to demand that you go on loving me forever if you will just love me in the moment when I desire it. Lovers of that sort know very well that the sensuous is transitory; they also know which is the most beautiful moment, and with that they are satisfied. Such an attitude, of course, is absolutely immoral; theoretically, however, it contains in a way an advance toward our goal, inasmuch as it lodges a veritable protest against marriage. [II 22] Insofar as this same disposition tries to assume a somewhat more respectable appearance, it restricts itself not only to the particular moment but extends this into a longer period of time, yet in such a way that instead of assimilating the eternal into its consciousness it assimilates the temporal or in this opposition to the eternal entangles itself with the conception of a possible change in time. It thinks that one can probably stand living together for some time, but it wants to keep an escape open in order to make a choice if a happier choice comes along. It makes marriage into a civil arrangement; one needs only to inform the proper authority that this marriage is over and a new one has been contracted, just as one reports that one has moved. Whether the state is served thereby, I shall leave undecided; for the particular individual it must truly be an odd relationship. This is why one does not see it realized in actuality [Virkelighed],27 but the age continually threatens to do so. And it would indeed require a great deal of brazenness for that—I do not feel that this word is too strong—just as it would betray a light-mindedness bordering on depravity, especially on the part of the female participant in this association.
But there is an entirely different spiritual disposition that can easily have a similar idea, and since it is very characteristic of our age, it is this that I shall discuss in detail here. A scheme such as this can have its basis in an egotistical or a sympathetic depression. Enough has been said about the light-mindedness of the age; it is high time, I think, to say a little about its depression, and I hope that everything will turn out better. Or, is not depression the defect of the age, is it not that which echoes even in its light-minded laughter; is it not depression that has robbed us of the courage to command, the courage to obey, the power to act, the confidence to hope? And now when the kind philosophers are doing everything to endow actuality with intensity, shall we not soon become stuffed so full that we choke on it. Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it. Now, it is certainly true that one ought not to vanish in a fleeting hope and that it is not in this way that one is going to be transfigured in the clouds, but in order truly to enjoy, one must have air; and it is not only in times of sorrow that it is important to have heaven open, but also in times of joy it is important to have an open prospect and the double doors open wide. To be sure, the enjoyment apparently loses a degree of the intensity that it has with the aid of an alarming limitation such as that, but not much should be lost thereby, since it has [II 23] something in common with the intense pleasure that costs the Strasbourg geese their lives.28 Perhaps it would be more difficult to make you perceive this, but I certainly do not need to go into detail about the significance of the intensity one achieves in the other way. In this respect, you are indeed a virtuoso, you, cui di dederunt formam, divitias, artemque fruendi [to whom the gods gave beauty, wealth, and the art of enjoyment].29 If to enjoy were the most important thing in life, I would sit at your feet to learn, for in that you are master. At times you can make yourself an old man in order to imbibe what you have experienced in long, slow draughts through the funnel of recollection;30 at times you are in your first youth, flushed with hope; at times you enjoy in a masculine way, at times in a feminine way, at times with immediacy; at times [you enjoy] reflection on the pleasure, at times reflection on the pleasure of others, at times abstinence from pleasure; at times you abandon yourself, your mind is open, accessible as a city that has capitulated, reflection ceases, and every step of the aliens echoes in the empty streets, and yet there is always one little observing outpost left; at times you shut your mind, you entrench yourself, inaccessible and brusque. This is how it is with you, and you will also see how egotistical your enjoyment is, and that you never give of yourself, never let others enjoy you. To an extent, you are probably justified in ridiculing the people who are drained by every pleasure—for example, the infatuated people with shredded hearts—since you, on the contrary, understand superbly the art of falling in love in such a way that this love throws your own personality into relief. You know very well that the most intensive enjoyment is in clutching the enjoyment in the consciousness that it may vanish the next moment. This is why the finale in Don Giovanni has pleased you so much.31 Pursued by the police, by the whole world, by the living and the dead, alone in a remote room, he once again gathers together all the powers of his soul, once again raises the goblet, and once again rejoices in the sounds of music.
I turn back, however, to my previous point, that a mixture of egotistic and sympathetic depression can give rise to that view. The egotistic depression naturally fears on its own account and, like all depression, is self-indulgent in enjoyment. It has a certain exaggerated obeisance, a secret horror of any contact with life. “What can one depend upon; everything may change; perhaps even this being I now almost worship [II 24] can change; perhaps later fates will bring me in contact with another being who for the first time will truly be the ideal of which I have dreamed.” Like all depression, it is defiant and is conscious of it; it thinks: Perhaps just this, that I bind myself to one person with an indissoluble bond, will make this being, whom I otherwise would love with my whole soul, become intolerable to me, perhaps, perhaps, etc. Sympathetic depression is more distressing and also somewhat more noble; it fears itself for the sake of the other. Who knows for certain that he cannot be changed; perhaps what I now regard as the good in me can disappear; perhaps what the beloved finds so captivating in me and what I want to keep only for her sake can be taken from me, and now she stands there disappointed, deceived. Perhaps a splendid prospect comes along for her; she is tempted, she perhaps does not withstand the temptation— good lord, to have that on my conscience. I have nothing to reproach her for; it is I who have become changed. I forgive her everything if she can only forgive me, that I was so incautious as to let her take such a decisive step. I am certainly confident that, far from wheedling her, I instead warned her against me, that it was her free decision; but perhaps this warning itself tempted her, made her see in me a better being than I was, etc. One will readily perceive that such a way of thinking is served as little by a connection for ten years as by one for five—in fact, not even by a connection such as the one Saladin made with the Christians for ten years, ten months, ten weeks, ten days, ten minutes,32 and as little served by such a connection as by one for a lifetime. One sees very well that such a way of thinking feels only too deeply the meaning of the saying that every day has its own troubles.33 It is an attempt to live every day as if this day were the decisive day, an attempt to live as if one were up for examination every day. Therefore, when in our day there is a great tendency to neutralize marriage, it is not because celibacy is regarded as more perfect, as in the Middle Ages, but it has its basis in cowardice and self-indulgence in enjoyment. It will also be obvious that such marriages, entered into for a specific time, are of no advantage, [II 25] since they have the same difficulties as those entered into for a lifetime, and furthermore they are so far from giving the ones involved the strength to go on living that, on the contrary, they vitiate the innermost power of marital life, relax the energy of the will, and minimize the blessings of the trust that marriage possesses. Moreover, it is already clear and later will be even more so that such associations are not marriages, since they, although entered into within the sphere of reflection, still have not attained the consciousness of eternity that morality has and that first makes the connection into marriage. This is also something on which you will entirely agree with me, for how often and how surely your ridicule and your irony have well-deservedly assailed such moods (“the accidental infatuations or love’s spurious infinity”34), where someone looks out the window with his fiancée, and at the same time a girl turns the corner into another street, and it occurs to him that she is the one he is really in love with—but when he pursues the trail, he is once again frustrated etc.
The second way out, the respectable way, was the marriage of convenience. One immediately hears in the designation that the sphere of reflection has been entered. Some people, you included, have always taken a dim view of this marriage, which steers a middle course here between immediate love and calculating understanding; for this really ought to be called, if one is to honor the use of language, it ought to be called the marriage based on calculation. In particular, you are always in the habit of very ambiguously recommending “respect” as a solid basis for a marital relation. Having to resort to such a way out as a marriage of convenience shows how thoroughly reflective the age is. Insofar as such a relation renounces real love, it is at least consistent but also shows thereby that it is not a solution of the problem. Therefore, a marriage based on calculation is to be regarded as a capitulation of sorts that the exigencies of life make necessary. But how sad it is that this seems to be almost the only consolation the poetry of our time has left, the only consolation that of despairing; indeed, it obviously is despair that makes such a connection acceptable. Therefore, it is usually entered into by persons who have long since reached their years of discretion and who also have learned that real love is an illusion and its fulfillment at most a pium desiderium [pious wish]. Therefore, what is involved is the prose of love, making a living, social status, etc. Insofar as it has neutralized [II 26] the sensuous in marriage, it seems to be moral, but a question still remains whether this neutralization is not just as immoral as it is unesthetic. Or even though the erotic is not completely neutralized, it is nevertheless daunted by a pedestrian, commonsensical view that one ought to be cautious, not all too hasty to reject, that life never does yield the ideal, that it is a really respectable match, etc. Consequently, the eternal, which, as already indicated above, belongs to every marriage, is not really present here, for a commonsensical calculation is always temporal. Therefore, such a connection is at the same time immoral and fragile. If that which is determinative is somewhat loftier, such a marriage based on calculation can take a more beautiful form. In that case, it is a motive foreign to the marriage itself that becomes the decisive factor—for example, out of love of her family a young girl marries a man who is able to rescue it. But precisely this external teleology readily shows that we cannot seek a solution of the problem here. At this point, I perhaps could appropriately discuss the numerous inducements for entering into a marriage, about which there is frequently sufficient talk. Such deliberation and shrewd consideration belong specifically in the sphere of the understanding. I prefer, however, to stick to the other point, where I also may, if possible, silence it.
It has now become apparent how romantic love was built on an illusion, and that its eternity was built upon the temporal, and that, although the knight remained deeply convinced of its absolute constancy, there nevertheless was no certainty of this, since its trial and temptation had hitherto been in an entirely external medium.35 To that extent, romantic love was in a very good position to accept marriage with a beautiful piety, but this still did not acquire deeper meaning. It has become apparent how this immediate, beautiful, but also simple love, assimilated in the consciousness of a reflective age, had to become the object of its ridicule and its irony. It has also become apparent what such an age was in a position to substitute for it. An age such as this also assimilated marriage in its consciousness and in part declared itself for love in such a way that marriage was excluded and in part for marriage in such a way that love was relinquished. This is why in a recent play a commonsensical little seamstress also makes the shrewd comment about fine gentlemen’s love: They love us but do not marry us; they do not love the fine ladies, but they marry them.36
[II 27] With this, my little exploration (for this is what I am constrained to call what I am writing, even though at first I had thought only of a long letter) has reached the point where marriage can first be properly elucidated. That marriage belongs essentially to Christianity, that pagan peoples have not perfected it, despite the sensuousness of the Orient and all the beauty of Greece, that not even Judaism has been able to do it, despite the truly idyllic marriages found there, this you will no doubt concede to me without my needing to go into it in more detail, and all the more so since it will be sufficient merely to remind you that sex differences were nowhere else so deeply reflected that the other sex thereby attained its full right. But in Christianity, too, love had to undergo many adversities before people came to see the depth, beauty, and truth that lie in marriage. But since the age immediately preceding ours, and to some extent the present one, was so reflective, it is not an easy matter to show this, and since I have found in you such a virtuoso in setting forth the weak sides, the extra task I have assigned myself, to persuade you, if possible, is doubly difficult. I owe it to you, however, to confess that I am very obligated to you for your polemic. If I were to imagine your multifarious, scattered comments, as I have received them, gathered into one, it would be so masterly and ingenious that it would be a good guide for the person who wants to undertake the defense, because your attacks, if you or anyone else ponders them, are not so superficial that they do not in themselves contain the truth, even though neither you nor your opponent is aware of it in the moment of battle.
Inasmuch as it now appeared as a defect in romantic love that it was not reflective, it might seem proper to have true marital love begin with a kind of doubt. This might seem all the more necessary because we come to it out of a world of reflection. That a marriage is artistically feasible after such doubt, I will by no means deny, but the question remains whether the nature of the marriage is not already altered thereby, since it envisages a separation between love and marriage. The question is whether it belongs essentially to marriage to annihilate the first love by doubting the possibility of realizing it, in order through this annihilation to make marital love possible and actual, so that Adam and Eve’s marriage would be the only one in which immediate love was kept inviolable, [II 28] and that again rather for the reason, as Musäus so wittily puts it, that there was no possibility of loving anyone else.37 The question remains whether the immediate, the first love, by being caught up into a higher, concentric immediacy, would not be secure against this skepticism so that the married love would not need to plough under the first love’s beautiful hopes, but the marital love would itself be the first love with the addition of qualifications that would not detract from it but would ennoble it. It is a difficult problem to pose, and yet it is of utmost importance, lest we have the same cleavage in the ethical [Ethiske] as in the intellectual between faith and knowledge. And yet, dear friend, it would be beautiful—this you will not deny me (for your heart, too, has a feeling for love, and your head, too, is all too well acquainted with doubts)—yet it would indeed be beautiful if the Christian dared to call his God the God of love in such a way he thereby also thought of that inexpressibly blissful feeling, that never-ending force in the world: earthly love.
Therefore, inasmuch as in the foregoing I have indicated romantic love and reflective love as confrontational positions, it will be clearly apparent here to what extent the higher unity is a return to the immediate, to what extent this contains, in addition to the something more that it contains, that which was implicit in the first. It is now sufficiently clear that reflective love continually consumes itself and that it altogether arbitrarily takes one position and then another; it is clear that it points beyond itself to something higher, but the point is whether this something higher cannot promptly enter into combination with the first love. This something higher is the religious, in which the reflection of the understanding ends, and just as nothing is impossible for God,38 so also nothing is impossible for the religious individual either. In the religious, love again finds the infinity that it sought in vain in reflective love. But if the religious, as surely as it is something higher than everything earthly, is also not something eccentric in relation to the immediate love but concentric with it, then the unity can indeed be brought about, except that the pain, which the religious certainly can heal but which nevertheless is a deep pain, would not become necessary. It is very seldom that one sees [II 29] this issue made the subject of deliberation, because those for whom romantic love has an appeal do not care much for marriage, and on the other side, so much the worse, many marriages are entered into without the deeper eroticism that surely is the most beautiful aspect of purely human existence. Christianity is unswervingly committed to marriage. Consequently, if marital love has no place within itself for the eroticism of first love, then Christianity is not the highest development of the human race; and surely it is a secret anxiety about such a discrepancy that is largely responsible for the despair that echoes in both modern poetry and prose.
So you see the nature of the task I have set for myself: to show that romantic love can be united with and exist in marriage—indeed, that marriage is its true transfiguration. No shadow at all will thereby be cast on the marriages that rescue themselves from reflection and its shipwreck, nor will it be denied that much can be done; neither shall I be so unsympathetic that I would withhold my admiration, nor will it be forgotten that the whole trend of the times can make this a sad necessity. As for the last, it must nevertheless be remembered that to a certain degree every generation and every individual in the generation begins his life from the beginning, and that in this way it is possible for each one individually to avoid this maelstrom, and nonetheless that one generation is supposed to learn from the other, and that consequently there is a probability that after reflection has used one generation for this sad drama a succeeding generation will be more fortunate. No matter how many painful confusions life can still manifest, I fight for two things: the enormous task of showing that marriage is the transfiguration of the first love and not its annihilation, is its friend and not its enemy; and for the task—to everyone else so very insignificant but to me all the more important—of showing that my humble marriage has had this meaning, whereby strength and courage are gained for the continual accomplishment of this task.
As I approach this exploration, I cannot help rejoicing that it is to you I am writing. Indeed, just as surely as I would speak about my marriage relationship to no other person, just as surely do I open myself to you in confident joy. When at times the noise of the struggling and laboring thoughts, of the prodigious mental machinery you carry within you, subsides, there come quiet moments that no doubt are at first almost alarming because of their stillness but that also soon prove to [II 30] be truly refreshing. I hope that this discussion finds you in such a moment; and just as one can unconcernedly confide in you anything one wishes, as long as the machinery is in operation, for then you hear nothing, so can one without surrendering oneself also tell you everything when your soul is still and solemn. Then I shall also speak about her of whom I ordinarily speak only to silent nature, because I want only to hear myself—her to whom I owe so much, among other things also that I dare to discuss with bold confidence the issue of first love and marriage, for of what, indeed, would I be capable with all my love and all my effort if she did not come to my aid, and of what, indeed, would I be capable if she did not inspire me to want to do it? Yet I know very well that if I said this to her, she would not believe me—yes, I perhaps would do wrong by saying this to her; I perhaps would disturb and agitate her deep and pure soul.
The first thing I have to do is to orient myself and especially you in the defining characteristics of what a marriage is. Obviously the real constituting element, the substance, is love [Kjærlighed]—or, if you want to give it more specific emphasis, erotic love [Elskov].39 Once this is taken away, married life is either merely a satisfaction of sensuous appetite or it is an association, a partnership, with one or another object in mind; but love, whether it is the superstitious, romantic, chivalrous love or the deeper moral, religious love filled with a vigorous and vital conviction, has precisely the qualification of eternity in it.
Every order [Stand] of life has its traitors; the order of marriage [Ægtestand] also has its traitors. Of course, I do not mean seducers, for they, after all, have not entered into the holy estate of marriage (I hope that this inquiry will find you in a mood in which you will not smile at this expression); I do not mean those who have withdrawn from it by a divorce, for they nevertheless have had the courage to be flagrant rebels. No, I mean those who are rebels merely in thought, who do not even dare let it manifest itself in deed; those wretched husbands who sit and lament that love vanished from their marriage long ago; those husbands who, as you once said of them, sit like lunatics, each in his marital cubicle, slave away in chains, and fantasize about the sweetness of engagement and the bitterness of marriage; those husbands who, according to your own correct observation, are among those who with a certain malicious glee congratulate anyone who becomes engaged. I cannot describe to you how contemptible they seem to me and how I relish hearing you say with a sly look, when [II 31] such a husband makes you his confidant and pours out all his troubles to you, reels off all his lies about the happy first love: Well, I will certainly see to it I don’t get out on that thin ice— and it embitters him even more that he cannot pull you into a commune naufragium [common shipwreck]. It is those husbands you so frequently refer to when you speak of a fond family man with four wonderful children who he wishes were miles away.
Insofar as there might be anything in what they say, then it would have to be a separation of erotic love and marriage, so that erotic love was placed in one period of time and marriage in another, but erotic love and marriage remained irreconcilable. One also soon found out the period in which erotic love belonged: it was the engagement, the beautiful time of engagement. With a kind of low-comedy excitement and emotion, they know how to chatter up and down about what it is to enjoy the engagement days. I must now confess that I have never cared very much for all that infatuated billing and cooing of the engagement, and the more that is made of this period, the more it seems to me to resemble the time it takes many people to dive into the water when they go swimming, time in which they walk up and down the dock, thrusting now a hand, now a foot, into the water, think that it is now too cold, now too warm. If the period of engagement actually were the most beautiful time, then I really do not see why, if they were right, one marries. But marry they do, and with all the bourgeois precision conceivable when the aunts and cousins, the neighbors and people living across the street find it suitable—something that betrays the same lethargy and slackness as that of regarding the engagement as the most beautiful time. If worst comes to worst, I prefer those foolhardy people who find pleasure only in jumping in. Nevertheless, it is always something, even though the motion never becomes as grand, the shudder of consciousness never as refreshing, the reaction of the will never as energetic, as when a strong masculine arm encloses the beloved firmly and yet tenderly, powerfully and yet in such a way that she feels herself free in this embrace—in order in the sight of God to dive into the sea of existence.
Now if such a separation of erotic love and marriage had any validity—except in the empty heads of a few foolish human [II 32] beings or, more correctly, of inhuman beings, who know as little of what erotic love is as of marriage—then it would look bad for marriage and for my attempt to show the esthetic in it or that marriage is an esthetic Chladni figure.40 But then on what grounds is there justification for such a separation? Either it might be because erotic love cannot be preserved at all. Then we would have the same mistrust and cowardliness that so frequently manifests itself in our age, whose distinctive characteristic is that it thinks development is retrogression and annihilation. I will now readily admit that a frail and feeble erotic love like that, equally unmanly and unwomanly (which you with your usual irrepressibleness would call tuppenny love), would not be able to withstand one single puff of life’s storm, but nothing would follow from this in regard to erotic love and marriage if both were in a healthy and natural condition. Or it might be because the ethical and the religious, which enter in with marriage, would turn out to be so heterogeneous to erotic love that they cannot be united, so erotic love presumably would be able to battle through life victoriously if it were permitted to be self-contained and to depend upon itself alone. But this point of view would now take the issue back either to the untested pathos of immediate love or to the mood and whim of the particular individual, who would feel able to finish the course under his own power. At first glance, this latter view—that the ethical and the religious in marriage are supposed to be what has the disturbing effect—displays a certain manliness that can easily deceive hasty observation and, even though mistaken, nevertheless has some sublimity in it that is altogether different from all that first wretchedness. I shall come back to this later, and all the more since my inquisitorial scrutiny would deceive me considerably if I did not see in you precisely one of these heretics infected to a certain degree by this fallacy.
The substance in marriage is erotic love, but which is first —is the erotic love first, or is the marriage first, so that erotic love follows afterward? This latter point of view has enjoyed no little esteem among people of limited understanding and has been recited frequently by shrewd fathers and even shrewder mothers who themselves think they have had experience and in compensation are unalterable in thinking that their children also ought to have experience. It is the wisdom that pigeon fanciers also have when they shut up in a small cage two pigeons that do not have the least sympathy for each other and think that they surely will learn to get along well together. This whole point of view is so narrow-minded that I have mentioned it merely for the sake of a kind of completeness and also to remind you of all you have abandoned in this [II 33] regard.
Consequently, erotic love is first. But erotic love, according to what was indicated previously, is also of such a delicate nature—although a nature so unnatural and coddled—that it simply cannot tolerate coming in contact with actuality. Here I am again at the point touched upon earlier. Here, then, the engagement seems to acquire its meaning. It is an erotic love, which has no actuality, which merely lives on the sweet pastry of possibility. The relationship does not have the reality of actuality [Virkelighedens Realitet41]; its movements are devoid of content, and it continually goes on with the same “meaningless, infatuated gestures.” The more unsubstantial the engaged people themselves are, the more even these merely simulated movements cost them in effort and exhaust their strength, the greater the need they will feel to evade the earnest form of marriage. Inasmuch as the engagement as such seems to be devoid of a necessary actuality derived from it, it would indeed be a splendid escape for those who lack the courage for marriage. When about to take the decisive step, they perhaps feel, and in all probability quite soulfully, a need to seek the help of a higher power and thus come to terms with themselves and with the higher power—with themselves by pledging themselves on their own responsibility, with the higher power by not avoiding the blessing of the Church, which they then proceed with rather considerable superstition to value too highly. Here again, in its cowardliest, flimsiest, and most unmanly form, we have a schism between erotic love and marriage. But such a monstrosity cannot lead astray; its erotic love is no erotic love: it lacks the sensuous element that has its moral [sædelig] expression in marriage; it neutralizes the erotic to such a degree that an engagement such as this could just as well take place between males. However, although it wants to maintain this separation, as soon as it asserts the sensuous it instantly switches over into the previously delineated directions. No matter how one looks at it, such an engagement is unbeautiful; it is also unbeautiful in the religious sense since it is an attempt to deceive God, to sneak into something for which it thinks it does not need his help, and entrusts itself to him only when it feels that things are not going well otherwise.
Marriage, then, ought not to call forth erotic love; on the contrary, it presupposes it not as something past but as something present. But marriage has an ethical and religious element that erotic love does not have; for this reason, marriage is based on resignation [Resignation], which erotic love does not have. If one is unwilling to assume that in his life every [II 34] person goes through the double movement42—first, if I may put it this way, the pagan movement, where erotic love belongs, and then the Christian movement, whose expression is marriage—if one is unwilling to say that erotic love must be excluded from Christianity, then it must be shown that erotic love can be united with marriage. Moreover, it occurs to me that if some unauthorized person were to see this paper, he probably would be very amazed that an issue like this could cause me so much trouble. Well, after all, I am writing this just for you, and your development is of such a nature that you fully understand—the difficulties.
First, then, an exploration of erotic love. Here I shall adopt an expression, despite your and the whole world’s mockeries, that nevertheless has always had a beautiful meaning for me: the first love (believe me, I will not yield, and you probably will not either; if so, there will be a strange misrelation in our correspondence). When I use this phrase, I think of one of the most beautiful things in life; when you use it, it is the signal that the entire artillery of your observations is firing. But just as for me this phrase has nothing at all ludicrous about it, and just as I, to be honest, tolerate your attack only because I ignore it, so neither does it have for me the sadness that it presumably can have for someone else. This sadness need not be morbid, for the morbid is always something false and mendacious. It is beautiful and healthy if a person has been unfortunate in his first love, has learned to know the pain of it but nevertheless remains faithful to his love, has kept his faith in this first love; it is beautiful if in the course of the years he at times very vividly recalls it, and even though his soul has been sufficiently healthy to bid farewell, as it were, to that kind of life in order to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful if he then sadly remembers it as something that was admittedly not perfect but yet was so very beautiful. And then sadness is far more beautiful and healthy and noble than the prosaic common sense that has long since finished with all such childishness, this devilish prudence of choir director Basil43 that fancies itself to be health but which is the most penetratingly wasting illness; for what does it profit a man if he gained the whole world but damaged his soul?44 For me the phrase “the first love” has no sadness at all, or at least only a [II 35] little admixture of sweet sadness; for me it is a password, and although I have been a married man for several years, I have the honor to fight under the victorious banner of the first love.
For you, however, the concept of the first, its significance, its over- and under-valuation, is a puzzling undulation. Sometimes you are simply and solely inspired by the first. You are so impregnated with the energy concentrated in it that it is the only thing you want. You are so kindled and inflamed, so amorous, so dreamy and creative, as weighty as a rain cloud, as gentle as a summer breeze—in short, you have a vivid idea of what it means that Jupiter visits his beloved in a cloud or in rain.45 The past is forgotten; every boundary is abolished.46 You expand more and more, you feel soft and supple, every joint becomes flexible, every bone a pliant sinew—just as a gladiator stretches and strains his body in order to have it completely under his control. Everyone must think that in so doing he dissipates his strength, and yet this voluptuous torture is the very condition that enables him to use his strength properly. Now, then, you are in the condition in which you enjoy the sheer voluptuousness of perfect receptivity. The gentlest touch is enough to make this invisible, expanded, psychic body tremble. There is a creature about which I fall into reverie rather often—it is the jellyfish. Have you noticed how this gelatinous mass can flatten itself into a plate and then slowly sink, then rise, so still and firm that one would think one could step on it. Now it notices its prey approaching; then it funnels into itself, becomes a pouch, and sinks with prodigious speed, deeper and deeper, with this speed snatching in its prey—not into its pouch, for it does not have a pouch, but into itself, for it is itself a pouch and nothing else. It is so able to contract itself that one cannot imagine how it could possibly extend itself. It is just about the same with you, and you must forgive me that I have not had a more beautiful creature with which to compare you and also that you perhaps can hardly keep from smiling at the thought of yourself as nothing but pouch. In such moments, then, you are in pursuit of “the first”; you want only that, without suspecting that it is a self-contradiction [II 36] to want the first to recur continually, and that consequently either you must not have reached the first at all or you actually have had the first and what you see, what you enjoy, is continually only a reflection of the first. At this point it is also to be noted that you are in error when you think that the first is supposed to be completely present in anything but the very first if only you seek it properly and that, insofar as you appeal to your performance, this is also a misunderstanding, since you have never performed in the right way.
At other times, however, you are as cold, as sharp and biting, as a March wind, as sarcastic as hoarfrost, as intellectually transparent as the air tends to be in spring, as dry and sterile, as egotistically astringent as possible. If it so happens that a person comes to harm in speaking to you in that condition about the first, about the beauty of the first, perhaps even about his first love, you become downright ill-tempered. Now the first becomes the most ludicrous, the most foolish of all, one of the lies in which one generation reinforces the next. Like a Herod, you fume from one slaughter of the innocents to the next.47 At such a time, you know how to propound at great length that clinging to the first this way is cowardliness and unmanliness, that the truth lies in the acquired, not in the given. I remember that in such a mood you once came up to visit me. You filled your pipe as was your custom, sat down in the softest easy chair, put your feet up on another chair, rooted around in my papers (I also remember that I took them away from you), and then burst out in an ironic eulogy of the first love and all the firsts, even “the first thrashing I got in school,”48 explaining in an illuminating note that you could say this with all the more emphasis since the teacher who had administered it to you was the only one you ever knew who could hit with emphasis; thereupon you ended by whistling this student ballad, and the chair on which you had put your feet you kicked to the other end of the room, and you left.
In you one seeks in vain for an explanation of what is hidden behind the cryptic phrase: the first, a phrase that has had and will ever have immense meaning in the world. The meaning this phrase has for the single individual is actually decisive for his whole intellectual-spiritual condition, just as the absence of any meaning whatever for him is sufficient to show that his [II 37] soul is not predisposed to be moved or shaken by something higher. For those, however, for whom “the first” has acquired meaning, there are two ways. Either the first contains the promise of the future, is the motivating, the infinite impulse. These are the happy individuals for whom the first is nothing but the present, but the present as the continually unfolding and rejuvenating first. Or the first does not motivate the individual within the individual; the power that is in the first does not become the propelling but the repelling power within the individual, becomes that which pushes away. These are the unhappy individualities who continually distance themselves more and more from “the first.” The latter, of course, can never occur totally without the fault of the individual himself.
Everybody who is moved by the idea attaches a solemn meaning to this phrase “the first,” and ordinarily the worst meaning is applied only to things belonging in a lower sphere. In this respect, you have plenty of examples: the first printing proofs, the first time one wears a new outfit, etc. The greater the probability that something can be repeated, the less meaning the first has; the less the probability, the greater the meaning; and on the other hand, the more meaningful that is which in its “first” manifests itself for the first time, the less the probability is that it can be repeated. Even if it is something eternal, then all probability of its being repeated vanishes. Therefore, if someone has spoken with a tinge of sadness about the first love, as if it can never be repeated, this is no minimizing of love but the most profound eulogy on it as the eternal power. Thus, to make a little philosophical flourish, not with the pen but with the mind, God became flesh only once, and it is futile to expect that it could happen more than once. In paganism, it could happen frequently, but that was simply because it was not a true incarnation. Thus, a person is born only once, and there is no probability of a repetition. Transmigration of souls fails to appreciate the meaning of birth.
With a few examples, I shall illustrate in more detail what I mean. We greet the first greenness, the first swallow with a certain solemnity. The reason for this, however, is the conception we attach to it; consequently, here what is heralded in the first is something other than the first itself, the first particular swallow. There is an engraving that portrays Cain murdering Abel. In the background, one sees Adam and Eve. Whether [II 38] the engraving itself is valuable I am unable to decide, but the caption has always interested me: prima caedes, primi parentes, primus luctus [the first killing, the first parents, the first sorrow]. Here again the first has a profound meaning, and here it is the first itself that we contemplate, but it is still more with respect to time than to content, since we do not see the continuity with which the whole is established by the first. (The whole must naturally be understood as sin propagating itself in the race. The first sin, if by this we think of Adam and Eve’s fall, would itself steer thought more to the continuity, but since it is the nature of evil not to have continuity,49 you will readily perceive why I do not use this example.)
Still another example. As is well known, several strict sects in Christendom have wanted to prove the limitation of the grace of God from the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews50 about the impossibility for those who have once been enlightened to be restored again to conversion if they fall away. Here, then, the first acquired its whole profound meaning. In this first, the whole profound Christian life proclaimed itself, and then the person who blundered in it was lost. But here the eternal is drawn too much into temporal qualifications. But this example can serve to illustrate how the first is the whole, the whole content. But when that which is foreshadowed in the first depends upon a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, then everything I have advanced previously seems to remain valid. The whole is implicite in the first and is present κατὰ κρύψιν [cryptically].
Now I am not ashamed to mention again the words: the first love. For the happy individualities, the first love is also the second, the third, the last; here the first love has the qualification of eternity; for the unhappy individualities, the first love is the instant; it acquires the qualification of the temporal. For the former, the first love, when it is, is a present. For the latter, it is, when it is, a past. If the fortunate individuals are also reflective and their reflection is directed to the eternal in love, it will be a strengthening of love; insofar as the reflection is on the temporal, it will be a breaking down of love. For the person who reflects temporally, the first kiss, for example, will be a past (just as Byron has put it in a short poem51); for the person [II 39] who reflects eternally, there will be an eternal possibility.
So much for the predicate we have given to love, the first. I shall now consider more closely the first love. But first I beg you to recall the little contradiction we encountered—the first love possesses the whole content; to that extent it seems most sagacious to snatch it and then go on to another first love. But when one empties the first love of its content in this way, it vanishes, and one does not obtain the second love either. But is not the first love only the first? Yes, but, if one reflects on the content, only insofar as one remains in it. Then if one remains in it, does it not nevertheless become a second love? No, precisely because one remains in it, it remains the first love— if one reflects upon eternity.
That such philistines, who think that now they have just about entered the period in which it would be appropriate to look around or to inquire (perhaps even in a newspaper) for a life mate, have shut themselves out once and for all from the first love, and that such a philistine state cannot be regarded as antecedent to the first love—this is certainly evident. No doubt it is conceivable that Eros could be compassionate enough to play also on such a person the trick of making him fall in love—compassionate enough, for it is surely extraordinarily compassionate to bestow upon a person the highest earthly good, and the first love is always that, even if it is unhappy, but this is always an exception, and his previous state remains equally unillustrative.
If we are to believe the priests of music, who in this respect presumably are the most trustworthy, and if among them we also give heed to Mozart, then the state that precedes the first love could probably be best described by recalling that love makes one blind. The individual becomes as if blind; one can almost see it on him: he sinks into himself, intuits within himself his own intuiting, and yet there is a continual striving to look out into the world. The world has dazzled him, and yet he stares out into the world. It is this dreaming and yet seeking state, just as sensuous as it is psychical, that Mozart has portrayed in the Page in Figaro.52
In contrast to this, the first love is an absolute awakening, an absolute intuiting, and this must be held fixed lest a wrong be done to it. It is directed upon a single specific actual object, which alone exists for it; nothing else exists at all. This one object [II 40] does not exist in vague outlines but as a specific living being. This first love has an element of the sensuous, an element of beauty, but nevertheless it is not simply sensuous. The sensuous as such first appears through reflection, but the first love lacks reflection and therefore is not simply sensuous. This is the necessity in the first love. Like everything eternal, it has implicit the duplexity of positing itself backward into all eternity and forward into all eternity. This is the truth in what poets so frequently have celebrated—that to lovers, even the very first moment they see each other, it seems as if they have already loved each other for a long time. This is the truth in the unswerving knightly faithfulness that fears nothing and is not alarmed by the thought of any disjunctive force.
But just as the nature of all love is a unity of freedom and necessity, so also here. The individual feels himself free in this necessity, feels his own individual energy in it, feels precisely in this the possession of everything he is. That is why it is unmistakably observable in every person whether he has truly been in love. There is a transfiguration, an apotheosis in it that endures throughout his whole life. There is a unison in him of everything that otherwise is dispersed; at one and the same moment, he is younger and older than usual; he is an adult and yet a youth, in fact, almost a child; he is strong and yet so weak; he is a harmony, as we said, that resonates in his whole life. We shall celebrate this first love as one of the most beautiful things in the world, but we shall not lack the courage to go further—to let it try itself.
This, however, is not what chiefly occupies us here. It is already possible to have here the same kind of doubt that will arise again later with respect to the relation between the first love and marriage. A religiously developed person makes a practice of referring everything to God, of permeating and saturating every finite relation with the thought of God and thereby consecrating and ennobling it. (This comment is, of course, oblique here.) Consequently, it seems inadvisable to let such feelings appear in the consciousness without taking counsel with God, but insofar as one does take counsel with God, the relation is altered. At this point, it is easier to dismiss the difficulty, for since it is the nature of first love to take by surprise, and because the fruit of surprise is involuntary, it is hard to see how such taking counsel with God would be possible. [II 41] Consequently, the only thing there could be any question of would be with regard to a continuing in this feeling, but this, after all, belongs to a later deliberation. But would it not be possible to anticipate this first love, inasmuch as in itself this knows no relation to God?
At this point, I can touch briefly on the marriages in which that which is decisive is located in someone or something other than the individual, in which the individual has not yet reached the qualification of freedom. We encounter the sad form of this where the individual seeks to evoke the object of his love through a connection with the forces of nature by means of witchcraft or other such arts. The nobler form has what, strictly speaking, must be called religious marriage. (True marriage, of course, does not lack the religious, but it also has the erotic element.) Thus when Isaac, for example, in all humility and trust leaves to God whom he is to choose as his wife, when in his confidence in God he sends his servant and does not himself look around,53 because his fate rests securely in God’s hands—this is truly very beautiful, but justice is not really done to the erotic. But one must keep in mind that however abstract the Hebrew God was otherwise, he nevertheless was close to the Jewish people and especially to its chosen one in all life situations, and, even though spirit, he was not so spiritual that he would not concern himself with earthly matters.54 For this reason, Isaac presumably dared with a certain degree of assurance to expect that God would surely choose a wife for him who was young and beautiful and highly regarded by the people and lovable in every way, but nevertheless we lack the erotic, even if it was the case that he loved this one chosen of God with all the passion of youth. Freedom was lacking.
In Christianity we see at times a vague and yet—precisely because of this vagueness and ambiguity—appealing blend of the erotic and the religious that has just as much brave and bold roguishness as it has childlike piety. This is found most often, of course, in Catholicism, and with us in its purest form among the common folk. Imagine (and I know you enjoy doing this, for it is indeed a situation) a young peasant girl with a pair of eyes audacious and yet modestly hiding behind her eyelashes, healthy, and freshly glowing, and yet there is something about her complexion that is not sickness but a higher healthiness. Imagine her on a Christmas Eve: she is alone in her room; midnight is already past, and nevertheless sleep, which ordinarily visits her so faithfully, is elusive; she feels a sweet, pleasant restlessness; she opens the window halfway and alone with the stars gazes out into the infinite space. A little [II 42] sigh lightens her heart; she closes the window. With an earnestness that is continually on the verge of roguishness55 she prays:
You wise men three,
Tonight let me see
Whose bread I shall bake
Whose bed I shall make
Whose name I shall carry
Whose bride I shall be,56
and then, hale and hearty, she jumps into bed. To be honest, it would be a disgrace for the three kings if they did not take care of her, and it is no use to say that no one knows whom she wishes—one knows that very well; at least, if not all the omens are wrong, she knows fairly well.
So we turn back to the first love. It is the unity of freedom and necessity. The individual feels drawn by an irresistible power to another individual but precisely therein feels his freedom. It is a unity of the universal and the particular; it has the universal as the particular even to the verge of the accidental. But all this it has not by virtue of reflection; it has this immediately. The more definite the first love is in this respect, the healthier it is, the greater the likelihood that it actually is a first love. By an irresistible force they are drawn to each other, and yet they enjoy therein their complete freedom. Now I have no hardhearted fathers handy, no sphinxes that have to be conquered first; I have adequate means to equip them (but I have not assigned myself the task, as novelists and playwrights do, of spinning out time to the torment of the whole world, of the lovers, the readers, and spectators); so, then, in God’s name let them come together. You see, I am playing a noble father, and it is in and by itself truly a very beautiful role, if only we ourselves had not often made it so ridiculous. You perhaps noticed that in the fashion of fathers I added the little phrase: in God’s name. For that you can certainly forgive an old man, who perhaps never knew what the first love is or has already [II 43] long ago forgotten it; but if a younger man, who is still carried away by the first love, lets himself attach importance to it, you perhaps are surprised.
The first love, then, has in itself complete spontaneous, original security; it fears no danger, defies the whole world, and I wish for it only that it may always have just as easy a time of it as in casu [in this case], for I certainly am placing no hindrances in the way. Perhaps I am doing it no favor thereby, and, on second thought, I may even fall into disgrace because of it. In the first love, the individual possesses an enormous power, and therefore it is just as unpleasant not to meet opposition as it would be for the brave knight who had obtained a sword that could cut stone if he then found himself placed in a sandy region where there was not even a twig on which he could use it. The first love, then, is sufficiently secure, it needs no support—if it should need a support, the knight would say, then it is no longer the first love. This also seems to be clear enough now, but it also becomes obvious that I am making a circle. We saw above that the defect in romantic love was that it stopped with love as an abstract an-sich [in itself], and that all the dangers it saw and desired were merely external, completely extraneous to love itself. We would also bring to mind that if the dangers came from the other side, from the interior, the matter would then become more difficult. But to that the knight would naturally reply: To be sure, if, but how would that be possible, and if it were, it would no longer be the first love. You see, it is not such an easy matter with this first love.
May I now remind you that it is a mistake to assume that reflection only annihilates [and remind you] that it rescues just as much. But since the task I have chiefly set for myself is to show that the first love can continue to exist in marriage, I shall now emphasize in more detail what I hinted at previously, namely, that it can be taken up into a higher concentricity and for that doubt is still not needed. I shall show later that it is the essential nature of first love to become historical, that the condition for that is precisely marriage, also that the romantic first love is unhistorical, even though one could fill folios with the knight’s exploits.
The first love, then, is in itself immediately certain, but the individuals are also religiously developed. This I certainly have leave to presuppose; yes, this I certainly must presuppose, since I am going to show that the first love and marriage can exist together. It is another matter, of course, if an unhappy [II 44] first love teaches the individuals to flee to God and to seek security in marriage. Then the first love is altered, even though it becomes possible to establish it again. They are, then, accustomed to bringing everything to God. But bringing everything to God naturally involves a multiplicity of different ways. Now, they do not seek God on the day of trouble, nor is it fear and anxiety that drive them to pray; their hearts, their whole beings are filled with joy—what is more natural for them, then, than to thank him for it? They fear nothing, for external dangers will have no power over them, and internal dangers—well, as a matter of fact, the first love is not acquainted with them at all. But the first love is not changed by this giving of thanks; no disturbing reflection has entered into it; it is caught up in a higher concentricity. But such thanksgiving, like all prayer, is united with an element of work (not in the external but in the internal sense), here the work of willing to hold fast to this love. The nature of the first love is not changed thereby; no reflection is involved; it does not come apart at the joints. It still has all its blessed and confident self-assurance; it is merely caught up in a higher concentricity. In this higher concentricity, it perhaps does not know at all what it has to fear, perhaps imagines no dangers at all, and yet it is drawn up into the ethical by the good intention, which also is a kind of first love. Now please do not charge me with making myself guilty of a petitio principii [presupposition of what is to be demonstrated] here by continually using the word “concentricity,” since I ought to assume, after all, that these regions are eccentric. To that I must answer that if I assumed the eccentricity, I would certainly never arrive at concentricity; but I also beg you to remember that in assuming this I am also demonstrating it. Thus we have now placed the first love in relation to the ethical and the religious, and it has become clear that its nature would not need to be altered thereby; but it was precisely the ethical and religious that made the union seemingly difficult, and consequently everything appears to be in order.
But I know you too well to dare hope “to put you off with anything like this.” After all, you know all the difficulties of the world. With your swiftly penetrating intellect, you have quickly thought about a multiplicity of scholarly tasks, life situations, [II 45] etc., but you stop everywhere with the difficulties, and I believe it is almost impossible for you in any single instance to go beyond them. In one sense, you are like a pilot, and yet you are just the opposite. A pilot knows the dangers and steers the ship safely into the harbor; you know the shallows and always run the ship aground. It goes without saying that you do the best you can and, one must confess, with great promptitude and familiarity. You have such a practiced eye for people and channels that you know immediately how far you have to go with them in order to run them aground. You are not light-minded either; likewise you do not forget that he is sitting out there; with a childish malice you are able to remember it until the next time you see him, and you then very solicitously ask about his health and how he came afloat. You presumably would not be at a loss for difficulties here either. You no doubt would recall that I had left it quite vague and indefinite as to which god was being discussed, that it was not a pagan Eros, who was so eager to share the secrets of erotic love and whose existence ultimately was a reflexion57 of the lovers’ own mood, but that it was the God of the Christians, the God of spirit, jealous of everything that is not spirit. You would recall that in Christianity the beautiful and the sensuous are negated; in a trice you would remark that, for instance, it would be a matter of indifference to the Christians whether Christ had been ugly or handsome; you would beg me with my orthodoxy to stay away from erotic love’s secret meetings, and especially to abstain from all attempts to mediate, to which you are more opposed than to even the most stubborn orthodoxy. “Yes, it must be very gratifying to a young maiden to stand before the altar, it must be in perfect harmony with her mood.58 And the congregation, it would probably look upon her as an imperfect creature who could not withstand the seduction of earthly desire; she would stand there as if she were being chastised in school or making a public confession, and so the pastor would first give her a lecture and after that perhaps lean over the railing and confidentially whisper to her, as a fragment of comfort, that marriage, however, is a state well-pleasing to God. The only aspect of this occasion that has any worth is the pastor’s situation, and if she was a beautiful, young girl, I would certainly like to be the pastor in order to whisper that secret in her ear.” My young friend! Yes, marriage is truly a state well-pleasing to God; on the other hand, I do not know of any place in the Bible that speaks of a special blessing on bachelors, and yet that is the outcome of all your many love affairs.
But when one has you to deal with, one has no doubt taken [II 46] on just about the most difficult task, for you are capable of demonstrating anything whatever and in your hands every phenomenon can be made into anything whatever. Yes, indeed, the Christian God is spirit and Christianity is spirit, and there is discord between the flesh [Kjød] and the spirit [Aand],59 but the flesh is not the sensuous [sandselig]—it is the selfish. In this sense, even the spiritual can become sensuous—for example, if a person took his spiritual gifts in vain, he would then be carnal [kjødelig]. And of course I know that it is not necessary for the Christian that Christ must have been physically beautiful; and it would also be very grievous—for a reason different from the one you give—because if beauty were some essential, how the believer would long to see him; but from all this it by no means follows that the sensuous is annihilated in Christianity. The first love has the element of beauty in itself, and the joy and fullness that are in the sensuous in its innocence can very well be caught up in Christianity. But let us guard against one thing, a wrong turn that is more dangerous than the one you wish to avoid; let us not become too spiritual. Obviously, neither can an appeal be made to your arbitrariness as to how you want to interpret Christianity. If your view were correct, then it certainly would be best that as soon as possible we begin with all the self-tormenting and annihilation of the physical we learn about in the excesses of the mystics; indeed, health itself would become suspect. Yet I doubt very much that any pious Christian will deny that he may pray to God to preserve his health, the God who went about healing the sick; the cripples, then, actually ought to have declined to be healed, for they were, after all, closest to perfection. The more simple and childlike a person is, the more he can also pray about; but since it is also one of the attributes of first love to be childlike, I see no reason at all why it should not be allowed to pray or, more correctly—to continue what was stated above—should not be allowed to thank God, without being altered in its nature.
But you perhaps have even more on your conscience; let it come out first as well as last. And if with regard to some comment in the following you should want to say, “You have never spoken to me this way before,” I shall answer, “Very true, but my good Mr. Observer must forgive a poor married man for being so bold as to make him an object of his observation. You are hiding something within you that you [II 47] never say right out. Therefore your expression is so very forceful, is so very resilient, because it indicates something more you are hinting at, an even more terrible outburst.”—So you have found what your soul hankered for, what it thought to find in many a mistaken venture. You have found a girl in whom your whole being finds rest, and even if you might seem to be a little too experienced, nevertheless this is your first love—of that you are convinced. “She is beautiful”—of course; “lovely”—oh, by all means; “and yet her beauty does not lie in that which conforms to the standard but in a unity of multiplicity, in the accidental, in the self-contradictory”; “she is soulful”—that I can believe; “her abandonment makes such an impression that everything almost goes black before one’s eyes; she is light, can swing like a bird on a branch; she has intelligence [Aand]—intelligence enough to illuminate her beauty, but no more.”
The day has come that will assure you the possession of all that you own in the world, moreover a possession of which you are adequately sure. You have requested the favor of administering Extreme Unction to her. For some time you have been waiting in the family dining room; a bustling maid, four or five inquisitive cousins, a venerable aunt, and a hairdresser have scurried by you several times. You are already somewhat annoyed by it. Then the door to the living room opens quietly. You quickly glance inside; you are pleased that there is not a soul, that she has had the tact to send all interlopers away even from the living room. She is beautiful, more beautiful than ever. About her there is an animation, a harmony, by whose vibrations she herself is set aquiver. You are amazed; she exceeds even your dreams. You, too, are transformed, but your subtle reflection instantly hides your emotion; your calmness has an even more seductive effect on her, casts a desire in her soul that makes her beauty interesting. You approach her; her splendid attire also lends an air of the unusual to the situation. As yet you have not said a word; you look, and yet as if you were not looking. You do not want to annoy her with amorous clumsiness, but even the mirror comes to your aid. You pin a brooch upon her breast, one you presented to her the very first day you kissed her with a passion that right now is seeking its confirmation; she herself has kept it hidden, no one has known about it. You take a little bouquet containing just one kind of flower, in itself a very insignificant flower. Always, whenever you sent her flowers, there was one little sprig of this flower, but unnoticeable, so that no one suspected but her alone. Today this flower, too, will come into honor and rank; it alone will adorn her, for she loved it. You hand it [II 48] to her; a tear trembles in her eye. She gives it back to you; you kiss it and pin it on her breast. A certain sadness comes over her. You yourself are moved. She steps back a little, looks at her finery almost with anger; it is an annoyance to her. She throws her arms around your neck. She cannot tear herself away; she embraces you violently as if there were a hostile force that wanted to tear you away from her. Her splendid attire is crushed, her hair has fallen down, and in that very instant she has disappeared. Once again you are left in solitude, which is interrupted only by a bustling maid, four or five inquisitive cousins, a venerable aunt, and a hairdresser. Then the door to the living room opens. She enters; a quiet earnestness is legible in every expression of her countenance. You shake her hand and take your leave to meet her again—before the altar of the Lord.
This you had forgotten. You who have given careful consideration to so much, also to this matter on other occasions, you in your infatuation had forgotten this. You have put up with circumstances that obtain for all, but on this you had not deliberated, and yet you are too mature not to see that a wedding is a bit more than a ceremony. You are seized with anxiety. “This girl, whose soul is pure as the light of day, sublime as the arch of heaven, innocent as the sea, this girl before whom I could kneel in adoration, whose love I feel could tear me out of all my confusion and give me rebirth, she is the one whom I am going to lead up to the altar of the Lord, she is going to stand there as a sinner—it will be said of her and to her that it was Eve who seduced Adam.60 To her, before whom my proud soul bows, the only one before whom it has bowed, to her it will be said that I am to be her lord and master and she is to be subservient to her husband.61 The moment has arrived, already the Church is stretching out its arms for her, and before it gives her back to me it will first press a bridal kiss upon her lips, not the bridal kiss for which I surrendered the whole world; already it is stretching out its arms to embrace her, but this embrace will make all her beauty fade, and then it will fling her away to me, and say: Be fruitful and multiply.62 What kind of authority is it that dares to thrust itself between me and my bride, the bride I myself have chosen and who has chosen me. And this authority will command her to be faithful to me—does she need, then, a command—and what if she would be faithful to me only because a third party, whom she loved more than me, commanded it! And it orders me to be faithful to her—do I need to be ordered, I who belong to her with my whole soul! And this authority determines our relation to each other; it says that I am to order [byde] and she to [II 49] obey [lyde]; but what if I do not want to order, what if I feel too inferior for that? No, her I will obey; for me her hint is my command but I will not submit to an alien authority. No, I will flee far, far away with her while there is still time, and I will bid the night to hide us and the silent clouds to tell us fairy tales in bold pictures, which is appropriate for a bridal night, and under the enormous arch of heaven I will become intoxicated with her charms, alone with her, alone in the whole world, and I will plunge down into the abyss of her love; and my lips are silent, for the clouds are my thoughts and my thoughts are clouds; and I will call and invoke all the powers of heaven and earth so that nothing may disturb my happiness, and I will put them on oath and have them swear this to me. Yes—away, far away, so that my soul can be healthy again, so that my chest can breathe again, so that I will not suffocate in this stuffy air—away!”
Yes, away—I, too, would say the same thing: Procul, O procul este profani [Away, away, O unhallowed ones].63 But have you also considered whether she would follow you on this expedition? “Woman is weak”; no, she is humble, she is much closer to God than is man. Moreover, her love is everything, and she certainly will not disdain this blessing and this confirmation that God wants to give her. Moreover, it has never occurred to a woman to have anything against marriage, and never in all eternity will it occur to her if the men themselves do not corrupt her, for an emancipated woman could perhaps hit upon such a thing. The offense always proceeds from the men, for the man is proud; he wants to be all in all, wants to have nothing over him.
That the picture I have just drawn fits you almost perfectly you certainly will not deny, and should you wish to do so, you at least will probably not deny that it fits the spokesmen for this trend. In order to describe your first love, I have deliberately changed the ordinary phrases a bit, for, to be honest, the love described, no matter how passionate it is, with however much pathos it proclaims itself, is still much too reflective, much too familiar with the coquettishness of erotic love for one to dare to call it a first love. A first love is humble and is therefore happy that there is an authority higher than itself, if for no other reason, then at least in order to have someone to thank. (This is why a pure first love is found more rarely in [II 50] men than in women.) Something similar to this is found also in you, for you did say that you would beseech all the powers in heaven and on earth, and you hereby already manifest a need to seek a higher point of departure for your love, except that with you it becomes a fetish with all possible capriciousness.
The first thing, then, that scandalized you was that you should be formally installed as her lord and master. As if you were not that, and perhaps far too much so; as if your words did not sufficiently bear this stamp, but you do not wish to relinquish this idolatry, this coquettishness—that you want to be her slave, although you certainly do feel yourself to be her lord and master.
The second thing was that it shocked your soul that your beloved would be declared a sinful woman. You are an esthete, and I could be tempted to pose it for your idle mind’s deliberation whether this very factor would not be able to make a woman even more beautiful; this implies a secret that casts an interesting light over her. The childlike roguishness that sin can have, as long as we dare predicate innocence of it, only heightens the beauty. You certainly can comprehend that I do not seriously maintain this view, since I sense very well and shall later develop what it implies, but, to repeat, if it had occurred to you, perhaps you would have become absolutely enthusiastic about this esthetic observation. Then you would have made a multiplicity of esthetic discoveries, whether it is most fitting, that is, most interesting, to use it almost for provocation by means of the most subtle innuendo, or to let the young innocent girl battle all alone with this dark force, or with a kind of pompous solemnity to seesaw her out of it into irony, etc.—in short, you would certainly have plenty to do in this respect. Eventually you would come to think of the shimmering light that even in the Gospel is shed on the sinner whose many sins were forgiven her because she loved much.64 What I would say, however, is that again it is your whimsicality that wants her to stand there as a sinner. It is one thing to know sin in abstracto, another to know it in concreto. But woman is humble, and it has never occurred to a woman really to be offended because the Church’s earnest words were spoken to her; woman is humble and trusting, and, also, who can cast down the eyes as a woman does, but who can also raise them up in such a way. If, then, a change should take place in her through the Church’s solemn declaration that sin has entered into the world, it would have to be that she would cling even more strongly to her love. But from this it by no means follows that the first love is altered; it is only drawn up into a [II 51] higher concentricity. It would be very difficult to convince a woman that earthly love is sin at all, since her whole existence would thereby be annihilated at its deepest root. Add to this that she certainly does not go up to the altar of the Lord to deliberate whether or not she is going to love this man who stands by her side. She loves him; in this she has her life, and woe to the one who arouses doubt in her, who will teach her to want to rebel against her nature and refuse to kneel before God but stand upright. Perhaps I should not accommodate you at all, for since you have the fixed idea that in order for first love truly to arise sin must not have entered into the world, you no doubt feel that you are shadow-boxing. (On the whole, by wanting to abstract from sin you show that you are immersed in reflection.) But since the individuals (to whom we attributed the first love) were religious, I do not need to become involved in any way in all this. The sinfulness is not in the first love as such, but in the selfishness in it, but the selfishness first emerges the moment it reflects, whereby it is then annihilated.
It finally shocks you that a third power wants to bind you to faithfulness to her and her to you. To keep things straight, I ask you to remember that this third authority does not force itself, but since the individuals we have in mind are religiously mature they themselves turn to it, and the relevant point is whether it puts any obstacle in the way of their first love. You will not deny, however, that it is natural for the first love to seek a confirmation by in one way or another making love an obligation, an obligation they impose upon themselves face to face with a higher power. The lovers swear faithfulness to each other by the moon, the stars, by the ashes of their fathers, by their honor, etc. If to that you say, “Well, such oaths are meaningless; they are merely a reflection of the lovers’ own mood, for how would it otherwise occur to them to swear by the moon,” then I would answer, “Here you yourself have altered the nature of the first love, for the very beauty of it is that everything acquires reality for it through the power of love; not until the moment of reflection does the meaninglessness of swearing by the moon become apparent; in the time of the oath, it has validity.” Is this relation changed through their swearing by a power that actually does have validity? I think not, for it is especially important to love that the oath has genuine [II 52] meaning. Therefore, if you think that you could readily swear by the clouds and the stars but it disturbs you that you shall swear by God, this proves that you are immersed in reflection. In other words, your love must have no sharer of the secret other than the kind who are not sharers. Now it is indeed true that love is secretive, but your love is so superior that not even God in heaven may know anything about it, although God, to use a somewhat frivolous expression, is an eyewitness who does not cramp one’s style. But that God must not know about it, this is selfishness and reflection, for at one and the same time God is in the consciousness and yet he is not supposed to be there. First love is not acquainted with such things.
This need, then, you do not have, the need to let love transfigure itself in a higher sphere, or, more correctly—for the first love does not have the need but does it spontaneously—you do have the need but refuse to satisfy it. If I now turn back momentarily to your imaginary first love, I would say: Perhaps you did succeed in invoking all the powers, and yet there grew a mistletoe65 nearby. It shot up, wafted coolness upon you, and yet it hid within itself a deeper warmth, and you both rejoiced in it. But this mistletoe is a sign of the feverish restlessness that is the life principle of your love; it cools off and heats up, is continually changing—indeed, you could simultaneously wish that the two of you might have an eternity before you and that this present instant might be the last—and therefore the death of your love is certain.
We saw, then, how the first love could come into relation with the ethical and the religious without having this happen by means of a reflection that altered it—since it is merely drawn up into a higher immediate concentricity. In a certain sense a change has occurred, and it is this that I now wish to consider—something that could be termed the metamorphosis of the lover and the beloved into groom and bride. The way it happens is that in taking their first love to God the lovers thank God for it. Thereby an ennobling change takes place. The man’s most besetting weakness is to imagine that he has made a conquest of the girl he loves; it makes him feel his superiority, but this is in no way esthetic. When, however, he thanks God, he humbles himself under his love, and it is truly far more beautiful to take the beloved as a gift from God’s hand than to have subdued the whole world in order to make a conquest [II 53] of her. Add to this that the person who truly loves will find no rest for his soul until he has humbled himself before God in this way, and the girl he loves means too much to him to dare take her, even in the most beautiful and noble sense, as booty. And if he should take delight in conquering and winning her, then he will know that the daily winning throughout a whole lifetime is appropriate, not a brief supranatural power of infatuation. Nevertheless, this does not occur as if it had been preceded by a doubt, but it occurs with immediacy. Consequently, the real life of the first love remains, but the raw spirits, if I may put it this way, are distilled. It is more natural for the opposite sex to feel man’s predominance, to submit to it, and even though she feels glad and happy in being nothing, it nevertheless is on the road to becoming something false. Now when she thanks God for the beloved, her soul is safeguarded from suffering; by being able to thank God, she places enough distance between herself and her beloved so that she can, so to speak, breathe. And this does not happen as the result of an alarming doubt—she knows no such thing—but it happens immediately.
I have already suggested above that in first love the eternity, even though illusory, made it moral. Now when the lovers refer their love to God, this thanks will already place an absolute stamp of eternity upon it, upon the intention and the obligation also, and this eternity will then be grounded not on obscure forces but on the eternal itself. The intention also has another significance. Implicit in it is the possibility of a movement in love and consequently also the possibility of being freed from the difficulty that plagues first love as such, namely, that it cannot make any progress. The esthetic consists in its infinitude,66 but the unesthetic consists in the impossibility of finitizing this infinitude. How it is that the entry of the religious cannot disturb the first love, I shall explain with a metaphorical expression. The religious is really the expression of the conviction that man by the help of God is lighter than the whole world, the same faith as that which is the basis for a person’s being able to swim. Now if there were such a swimming belt that could hold one up, it is conceivable that someone who had been in peril of his life would always wear it, but it is also conceivable that a person who had never been in peril of his life would also wear it. The latter instance is the case with the relation between the first love and the religious. [II 54] The first love girds itself with the religious without having experienced any painful incident or anxious reflection beforehand, but I must beg you not to press this metaphor, as if the religious had a merely external relation to it. In fact, it was shown above that this is not the case.
So let us now once and for all settle the account. You talk so much about the erotic embrace—what is that compared with the marital embrace? How much more richness of modulation there is in the marital “mine” than in the erotic. It resonates not only in the eternity of the seductive moment, not only in the illusory eternity of imagination and idea, but in the eternity of consciousness, in the eternity of eternity. What power there is in the marital “mine,” for will, decision, intention, have a far deeper tone;67 what energy and suppleness, for what is as hard as will, and what so soft. What power of movement there is, not just the confused excitement of dark impulses, for marriage is instituted in heaven, and duty penetrates the whole body of existence to the uttermost extremity and prepares the way and gives the assurance that in all eternity no obstacle will be able to disturb love! So let Don Juan keep his romantic bower, and the knight his nocturnal sky and stars—if he sees nothing beyond them. Marriage has its heaven even higher. So it is with marriage, and if it is not like this, it is not God’s fault, or Christianity’s fault, not of the wedding ceremony, not of the malediction, not of the benediction, but solely of the people themselves. And is it not really too bad the way books are written that throw people into confusion about life, make them bored with it before they begin it—instead of teaching them to live. And even if they were right, it would be a painful truth, but it is a lie. They teach us to sin, and those who do not have the courage for that are made just as unhappy in some other way. Unfortunately, I myself am too much under the influence of the esthetic not to know that the word “husband” grates on your ears. But it does not matter to me. If the word “husband” has come into discredit and has almost become something ludicrous, then it is high time we again seek to hold it in honor. And if you say, “Although one sees plenty of marriages, a marriage such as this is never seen,” this does not upset me, because seeing marriages every day makes one rarely perceive the greatness in marriage, especially since everything is done to belittle it, for have you people not carried it so far that a girl who gives a man her hand before the altar is regarded as inferior to those heroines in your romantic novels with their first love?
After having listened so patiently to you and your outbursts, wilder than you perhaps will properly acknowledge [II 55] (but when marriage confronts you as an actuality, you will see—even if you perhaps have not completely understood these emotions in yourself—then it will rage within you, although again you probably will not confide in anyone), you must forgive me that I come forward with my little observations. One loves only once in one’s life; the heart clings to its first love68—marriage. Listen to and admire this harmonious unison of different spheres. It is the same subject, only expressed esthetically, religiously, and ethically. One loves only once. In order to make this real, marriage enters in, and if people who do not love each other take it into their heads to marry, it is not the fault of the Church. One loves only once—this resounds from the most diverse sources, from the happy ones who are reassured every day of this, and from the unhappy ones. Of them there actually are only two classes—those who are always craving for the ideal and those who do not wish to hold fast to it. The latter are the real seducers. They are seldom encountered, because it takes something out of the ordinary to be that. I have known one, but he also admitted that one loves only once—but love had been unable to tame his wild desires. Sure enough, certain people say one loves only once but marries two or three times. Here again the spheres are united, for esthetics says “No” and the Church and Church ethics look dubiously upon the second marriage. This is of utmost importance to me, for if it were true that one loved several times, then marriage would become a dubious matter; then it might appear as if the erotic would suffer damage because of the arbitrariness of the religious, which ordinarily would demand that one should love only once and consequently would treat this matter of the erotic as casually as if it were to say: You can marry once, and with that be finished with the matter.
We have now perceived how the first love entered into relation with marriage without thereby being altered. The same esthetic element implicit in the first love must then also be in marriage, since the former is contained in the latter, but, as developed above, the esthetic consists in the infinitude, the apriority, that the first love has. Thereupon it is implicit in the unity of contrasts that love is: it is sensuous and yet spiritual; it is freedom and yet necessity; it is in the instant, is to a high degree present tense, and yet it has in it an eternity. All this marriage [II 56] also has; it is sensuous and yet spiritual, but it is more, for the word “spiritual [aandelig]” applied to the first love is closest to meaning that it is psychical [sjælelig], that it is the sensuous permeated by spirit. It is freedom and necessity, but also more, for freedom applied to the first love is nevertheless actually rather the psychical freedom in which the individuality has not yet purified itself of natural necessity. But the more freedom, the more self-giving, and only he can be prodigal with himself who possesses himself. In the religious, the individuals became free—he from false pride, she from false humility—and the religious pushed in between the two lovers, who held each other so tightly encircled, not to separate them but so that she could give herself with an exuberance that she had not previously suspected and so that he could not only receive but give himself and she receive. Even more than the first love, it has an interior infinitude, for marriage’s interior infinitude is an eternal life. Even more than first love it is a unity of contrasts, for it has one more contrast, the spiritual, and thereby the sensuous in an even more profound contrast; but the further away from the sensuous one is, the more esthetic significance it acquires, for otherwise the animal instincts would be the most esthetic. But the spiritual in marriage is higher than that in the first love, and the higher the heaven is over the marriage bed, the better, the more beautiful, the more esthetic it is; and it is not the earthly heaven that arches over marriage but the heaven of the spirit. It is in the instant, sound and powerful; it points beyond itself, but in a deeper sense than the first love, for the abstract character of first love is precisely its defect, but in the intention that marriage has, the law of motion is implicit, the possibility of an inner history. Intention is resignation in its richest form, in which the concern is not for what is to be lost but for what is to be gained by being held fast. In the intention, an other is posited, and in the intention love is placed in relation to that other, but not in the external sense. But the intention [Forsæt] here is not the acquired fruit of doubt but the overabundance of the promise [Forjættelse]. So beautiful is marriage, and the sensuous is by no means repudiated but is ennobled. Indeed, I confess it—perhaps it is wrong of me—frequently when I think of my own marriage the notion that it will cease to be awakens in me an inexplicable sadness, as does the thought that—sure as I am that in another life I will live with her to whom my marriage joined me—this will give her to me in another way, and the contrast that was a condition belonging to our marriage will be annulled. Nevertheless it comforts me that I know, and I shall recollect, that I [II 57] have lived with her in the most intimate, the most beautiful association that life on this earth provides. If I do have any understanding of the whole subject, the defect in earthly love [Kjærlighed] is the same as its merit—that it is preference [Forkjærlighed]. Spiritual love has no preference and moves in the opposite direction, continually sheds all relativities. Earthly love, when it is true, goes the opposite way and at its highest is love only for one single human being in the whole world. This is the truth of loving only one and only once. Earthly love begins with loving several—these loves are the preliminary anticipations—and ends with loving one; spiritual love continually opens itself more and more, loves more and more people, has its truth in loving all. Thus marriage is sensuous but also spiritual, free and also necessary, absolute in itself and also within itself points beyond itself.
Since marriage is an inner harmony in this way, it of course has its teleology in itself; it is, since it continually presupposes itself, and thus any question about its “why” is a misunderstanding, which is very easily explained by prosaic common sense, which, although it usually seems a little more modest than choir director Basil, who is of the opinion that of all the ludicrous things marriage is the most ludicrous,69 nevertheless readily tempts not only you but also me to say, “If marriage is nothing else, then of all the ludicrous things it is actually the most ludicrous.”
Just to pass the time, however, let us look a little more closely at one or another of these. Even if there will be a great difference in our laughter, we might just as well laugh a little together. The difference will be approximately the same as the different tone of voice we would use in answering the question “Why is there marriage?” with the words: God only knows. Moreover, when I say that we will laugh a little together it by no means must be forgotten how much in this respect I owe to your observations, for which as a married man I really do thank you. That is, if people do not wish to fulfill the most beautiful task, if they want to dance everywhere else but on the island of Rhodes70 that is assigned to them as a dancing place, [II 58] then let them be a victim for you and for other rogues who under the mask of a confidant know how to pull their legs. But there is one point that I want to rescue, a point about which I never have and never will allow myself to smile. You have often said that it would be “absolutely superb” to go around and ask every one individually why he got married, and one would discover that usually the deciding factor was a very insignificant circumstance, and you then explore how ludicrous it is that such an enormous effect as a marriage with all its consequences can emerge from such a little cause. I shall not dwell on the mistake implicit in your looking at a little circumstance altogether abstractly, and on the fact that most often it is only because the little circumstance joins a multiplicity of factors that something results from it.
What I want to stress, however, is the beauty in the marriages that have as little “why” as possible. The less “why,” the more love—that is, if one perceives the truth in this. To be sure, to the light-minded person it will subsequently appear that it was a little “why”; to the earnest person it will to his joy appear that it was an enormous “why.” Indeed, the less “why,” the better. Among the lower classes, marriage is ordinarily entered into without any great “why,” but for this reason these marriages resound much less frequently with so many “hows”—how are they going to manage, how are they going to take care of the children, etc. Nothing else ever belongs to marriage but marriage’s own “why,” which is infinite and consequently in the sense in which I take it is no “why”—something of which you, too, will easily convince yourself; for if one were to answer the “why” of such a commonsensical philistine married man with this authentic “therefore,” he very likely would respond as did the school teacher in Alferne: “Then let us get a new lie.”71 You will also perceive why I do not wish and cannot manage to see a comic side to the lack of this “why,” for I fear that the truth will thereby be lost. There is only one true “why,” but it also has an intrinsic, infinite energy and power that can quell all “hows.” The finite “why” is a sum, a swarm, from which each one picks his own, the one more, another fewer—the whole lot just as foolish, for even if someone could unite all the finite “whys” upon his entrance into marriage, he would simply be the most wretched of all husbands.
[II 59] One of the ostensibly most respectable answers given to this “why” of marriage is: Marriage is a school for character; one marries in order to ennoble and cultivate one’s character. I will turn my attention to a specific circumstance for which I am indebted to you. It involved a public official “you had got hold of”—that was your own phrase and is just like you, for you shrink from nothing when there is an object for your observation, since you believe that you are following your calling. Incidentally, he was a rather intelligent fellow and in particular had considerable linguistic talent. The family gathered at the tea table. He was smoking his pipe. His wife was no beauty, rather plain looking, old in relation to him, and thus one could, as you remarked, immediately think that the “why” had to be an eccentric one. At the tea table sat a young, somewhat pale, newly married woman who seemed to know another “why”; the mistress herself poured the tea, and a young sixteen-year-old girl, not beautiful but buxom and lively, served it; as yet she seemed not to have arrived at any “why.” In this worthy company, Your Unworthiness had also found a place. You, who were present ex officio, who had already gone there a few times to no avail, of course found the situation far too propitious to dare leave it unutilized. Precisely in those days there was some talk of a broken engagement. As yet the family had not heard this important local news. The case was pleaded from all sides—that is, all were actores [plaintiffs]; the case was then taken to judgment and the sinner excommunicated. Feelings were stirred up. You ventured to insinuate a little comment in favor of the one convicted, which naturally was not intended to benefit the person in question but to provide a cue. When it failed, you went on to say, “Perhaps the whole engagement was precipitous; perhaps he did not analyze the important ‘why’—one could almost say the aber [but] that ought to precede such a decisive step; enfin [finally], why does one marry, why, why.” Each one of these “whys” was spoken in a different tone of voice but nevertheless just as dubitively. It was too much. One “why” would have been sufficient, but such a complete roll call, a fully mobilized march into the enemy camp, was decisive. The moment had arrived. With a certain good nature, which also bore the marks of prevailing common sense, the host said: Well, my good man, I shall tell you why—one marries because marriage is a school for character. That started everything; partly by opposition, partly by approbation, you made him surpass himself [II 60] in bizarreness—to the slight edification of his wife, to the offense of the young wife, and to the astonishment of the young girl. I already at that time reproached you for your behavior, not for the sake of the host but for the sake of the women, to whom you were spiteful enough to make the scene as troublesome and protracted as possible. The two women do not need my defense, and for that matter it was just your habitual coquettishness that induced you not to lose sight of them. But his wife—perhaps she nevertheless actually loved him, and must it not therefore have been terrible for her to listen. Add to that the fact that there was something indecent in the whole situation. So far is commonsensical reflection from making marriage moral that it actually makes it immoral. Sensuous love has but one transfiguration, in which it is equally esthetic, religious, and ethical—and that is love; commonsensical calculating makes it just as unesthetic as irreligious, because the sensuous is not within its immediate rights. Consequently, a person who marries for this and that etc. is taking a step that is just as unesthetic as it is irreligious. The goodness of his objective is of no use, for the mistake is precisely that he has an objective. If a woman married—yes, such lunacy has been heard of in the world, a lunacy that seems to give her marriage a prodigious “why”—in order to bear a savior for the world, this marriage would be just as unesthetic as immoral and irreligious. This is something people cannot make clear to themselves often enough. There is a certain group of commonsensical men who look down with enormous contempt on the esthetic as trumpery and child’s play and who in their wretched teleology consider themselves high above such things, but it is precisely the opposite; in this commonsensicality such people are just as immoral as they are unesthetic. This is why it is always best to look at the other sex, which is both the more religious and the more esthetic. In other respects, the host’s discourse certainly was trivial enough, and I do not need to present it. I shall, however, conclude this observation by wishing for every such husband a Xanthippe for a wife72 and children as depraved as possible—so that he can hope to possess the condition for the attainment of his objective.
That marriage is otherwise actually a school for character [II 61] or—in order to avoid using so philistine a phrase—is the genesis of character, I will readily concede, although I naturally must continually hold that anyone who married for this reason might rather be relegated to any school whatever except the school of love. Moreover, such a person will never benefit from this schooling. In the first place, he deprives himself of the strengthening, the integration, and the penetrating shiver through every thought and joint that make up marriage, for it truly is a venturesome action; but so it should be, and wanting to calculate is so far from being right that any such calculating is precisely an attempt to enervate it. In the second place, he of course loses out on love’s enormous working capital and on the humility that the religious provides in marriage. Naturally he is much too super-sagacious not to bring along a fixed cut-and-dried conception of how he wants to be developed; this, then, becomes the norm for his marriage and the unhappy creature he was shameless enough to select for his guinea pig. But let us forget that and with thankfulness recall how true it is that marriage does educate—that is, if one does not feel superior to it but, as always when it is a question of education, subordinates oneself to that by which one is to be educated. It matures the whole soul by simultaneously giving a sense of meaning and also the weight of a responsibility that cannot be sophistically argued away, because one loves. It ennobles the whole man by the blush of modesty that belongs to the woman but is the man’s disciplinarian, for woman is man’s conscience. It brings melody into a man’s eccentric movement; it gives strength and meaning to the woman’s quiet life, but only insofar as she seeks this in the man and thus this strength does not become an unfeminine masculinity. His proud ebullience is dampened by his constant returning to her; her weakness is strengthened by her leaning on him.*
* Therefore, it is marriage that first actually gives a person his positive freedom, because this relationship can extend over his whole life, over the least as well as the greatest. It frees him from a certain unnatural embarrassment in natural things, which probably can be acquired in many other ways, but then also very easily at the expense of the good; it frees him from stagnating in habit by maintaining a fresh current; it frees him from people precisely by binding him to one human being. I have often noticed that people who are unmarried drudge just like slaves. In the first place, they are slaves to their whims; in their daily lives they dare to indulge themselves in everything, owe no one an accounting, but then they also become dependent on, in fact, slaves of, other [II 62] people. What a role a servant, a housekeeper, etc. often plays. They are their master’s personified whims and inclinations reduced to the stroke of the hour and minute; they know when the master gets up or, more correctly, how long in advance he should be called or, more correctly, how long in advance his study should be warmed before he is called; they know how to lay out his clean linen, to roll his stockings so that he can pull them on easily, to have cold water ready when he has washed himself in warm water,73 to open the windows when he goes out, to set out his bootjack and house slippers for him when he comes home, etc. etc. The domestic staff, especially if they are somewhat on the bright side, easily make themselves familiar with all this. Now, although all this occurs punctually on the dot, such unmarried people often are not satisfied. After all, they are able to buy the satisfaction of every wish. On occasion, they are ill-tempered and petulant, afterward weak and good-natured. Indeed, a couple of rix-dollars makes everything all right. The servants soon learn how to make use of this; consequently, it is just a matter of doing something a bit wrong at proper intervals, letting the master rage, becoming heartbroken over it, and thereupon receiving a tip. The master and mistress are very charmed by such a person; the master does not know whether he should admire more his scrupulousness or the repentance he shows when he has done wrong. A servant like this becomes invaluable to the master and mistress and is a perfect despot.
Now for all the minutiae involved in marriage. Yes, here [II 62] you will surely agree with me—but also pray God to spare you from it. No, there is nothing that educates as much as the minutiae. There is a period in a person’s life when such things ought to be removed from him, but there is also a period when they are good. It takes a great soul to save his soul from minutiae, but he can if he will, because to will makes the great soul, and the person who loves, wills. This can be difficult, especially for the man, and this is why the woman has such great significance for him in this respect. She is created to deal with little matters and knows how to give them a meaning, a value, a beauty that enchants. They rescue from habits, from the tyranny of one-sidedness, from the yoke of whims, and how would all this evil find time to take shape in a marital union, which calls itself to account so many times and in so many ways. Nothing like that can thrive, for “love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful, it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures [II 63] all things.”74 Think of these beautiful words by one of the Lord’s apostles; think of them applied to a whole life in such a way that to them is linked a conception that one enacted them effortlessly many times, failed many times, forgot many times, but nevertheless turned back to them again. Think of a married couple, that they dare to say these words to each other in such a way that the main impression still remains joyous; what a blessing there is in this, what a transfiguration of character! In marriage, one makes no headway with great passions. One cannot give or receive in advance; by being exceedingly affectionate for one month, one cannot compensate for another time; here it is true that every day has its own troubles,75 but also its own blessings. I know that I have subjugated my pride and my hypochondriacal restlessness to her love; I have subjugated her vehemence to our love. But I also know that it has cost many days; I also know that there may be many dangers ahead, but my hope is for victory.
76Or a person marries—to have children, to make his small contribution to propagating the human race on this earth. Imagine—if he had no children, his contribution would be very small. In offering rewards to those who married and to those who had the most male children, countries certainly have allowed themselves to have this purpose for marriage. At times, Christianity has opposed this by offering rewards to those who refrained from marriage. Even if this was a mistake, it nevertheless shows a profound respect for personality to go that far to make the single individual definitive and not just a factor. The more abstractly the state is conceived and the less the individual has fought his way out of this, the more natural is such an offer and such an encouragement. In contrast to this, in our age marriage without children is at times almost extolled. In other words, our age has had a hard time effecting the resignation it takes to enter into a marriage; if one has denied oneself to that extent, one thinks that this is enough and cannot really put up with such tedious difficulties as a flock of children. It is alleged frequently enough in novels, albeit casually but nevertheless as a reason for a particular individual not to marry, that he cannot endure children; in life in the most civilized countries this is expressed by the removal of the children [II 64] from the parental house as soon as possible and their placement in a boarding school etc. How often have you not been amused by these tragi-comic family men with four darling children whom they secretly wished were far, far away? How often have you not gloated over the outraged sensibilities of such family men at all the petty details that life entails, when the children have to be spanked, when they spill on themselves, when they scream, when the great man—the father— feels frustrated in his venturesomeness by the thought that his children tie him to the earth? How often have you not with well-deserved cruelty brought such noble fathers to the peak of suppressed rage when you, occupied exclusively with his children, dropped a few words about what a blessing it really is to have children?
To marry in order to contribute to the propagation of the human race could seem to be both a very objective and a very natural reason. It would be as if one put oneself in God’s position and from this position saw the beauty in the maintenance of the human race; yes, one could place special emphasis on the words: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”77 And yet such a marriage is just as unnatural as it is arbitrary and devoid of a stronghold in Holy Scripture. As far as the latter is concerned, we read that God instituted marriage because it was not good for man to be alone, in order to give him company.78 Now even if some scoffer at religion might consider somewhat dubious the company that commenced by plunging the man into corruption, this proves nothing, and I would rather cite this event as a motto for all marriages, because not until the woman had done this was the most intimate association strengthened between them. Then, too, we also read these words: And God blessed them.79 These words are completely ignored. And when the apostle Paul somewhere quite severely orders women to receive instruction in silence, in all humility, and to be silent, and then, having silenced her, to humiliate her still more, adds: She will be saved by bearing children, I truly would never have forgiven the apostle this contempt if he had not redeemed everything by adding: if they (the children) continue in faith and love and holiness with discipline.80
In this connection, it occurs to me that it might seem strange [II 65] that I, whose business allows me only little time for studies and whose lowly studies are ordinarily in an entirely different direction, seem to be so conversant with the Bible that I could be qualified for the theological degree. An ancient pagan—I believe it is Seneca—has said that when a person has reached his thirtieth year he ought to know his constitution so well that he can be his own physician;81 I likewise believe that when a person has reached a certain age he ought to be able to be his own pastor. Not as if I would in any way minimize participation in public worship and the guidance given there, but I do think that one ought to have one’s view settled with regard to the most important life relationships, which, furthermore, one seldom hears preached about in the stricter sense. To devotional books and printed sermons, I have an idiosyncratic aversion; that is why I resort to Scripture when I cannot go to church. For information, I then consult some scholarly theologian or some scholarly work where the most important Scripture passages on the subject in question are to be found, and then I read them through. So I was already married and had been married for half a year before it occurred to me to deliberate seriously on what the New Testament teaches about marriage. I had attended several weddings prior to my own; consequently I knew the sacred words declared on this occasion. I still wanted, however, a little more thorough knowledge and therefore turned to my friend Pastor Olufsen, who was in town just then. With his instruction, I found the main passages82 and read them aloud to my wife. I remember very well the impression that particular passage83 made on her. Moreover, it was a delicate matter. I was not acquainted with the passages in the Bible that I was about to read to her, and I did not wish to look at them in advance. I do not like to prepare the impression I wish to make on her; anything like that is based on misplaced distrust. This you could take to heart; to be sure, you are not married and thus have no human being to whom you are committed in the strictest sense to be open, but your preparation actually verges on the ludicrous. Certainly you can fool people, can appear to do everything very casually, as impromptly as possible, and yet I do not believe you can say “Goodbye” without having deliberated on how you will say it.
But back to marriage and the indefatigable folk married for the multiplication of the human race. This kind of marriage sometimes conceals itself under a more esthetic cover. It is an aristocratic old noble family that is about to die out; there are only two representatives left—a grandfather and his grandson. It is the venerable old man’s only wish that the son marry so that the family will not be wiped out. Or it is a man on whose [II 66] life not so much weight is placed but who thinks back with a certain sadness, if no further back, at least to his own parents, loves them so deeply that he could wish this name might not die out but be preserved in the thankful recollection of living persons. Perhaps he has a vague notion of how beautiful it would be to be able to tell his children about their grandfather long since dead, to fortify their lives with such an ideal image that belongs only to recollection, to inspire them to everything noble and great by this conception; perhaps he will think that in so doing he will be able to repay some of the debt he feels he owes his parents.
Now this is all good and beautiful, but it is still irrelevant to marriage, and a marriage entered into solely for this reason is just as unesthetic as immoral. This might seem a hard saying, but it is nevertheless true. Marriage can be undertaken with only one intention, whereby it is just as ethical as esthetic, but this intention is immanent; any other intention divides what belongs together and thereby makes finitudes of both the spiritual and the sensuous. It may very well happen that by talking this way a person can win a girl’s heart, especially if he truly has the feelings described, but it is wrong, and her being is actually altered; it is always an insult to a girl to want to marry her for any other reason than that one loves her.
Even though every stud-consideration (to use your expression) as such is irrelevant to marriage, the family will prove to be a blessing to the person who has not disordered the relationship for himself. For one human being to owe another as much as possible is still a beautiful thing, but nevertheless the highest thing a human being can owe another is—life. And yet a child can owe a father even more, because, after all, it does not receive life bare and blank but receives it with a definite content, and when it has rested on its mother’s breast long enough it is laid upon its father’s, and he also nourishes it with his own flesh and blood, with the frequently hard-earned experiences of an eventful life. And what possibility there is in a child! I readily agree with you in your hatred of the idolatry that is carried on with children, especially the whole cult of the family and the rite of children circling the table at dinner and supper for the family kiss, the family adulation, the family hopes, while the parents smugly thank each other for the problems surmounted and rejoice over the finished artistic [II 67] product. Yes, I confess it—I can be just as sarcastic about such odious practices as you are, but I do not let myself be more disturbed by it than that. Children belong to the innermost, hidden life of the family, and to this bright-dark mysteriousness one ought to direct every earnest or God-fearing thought on this subject. But then it will also appear that every child has a halo about its head; every father will also feel that there is more in the child than what it owes to him. Yes, he will feel in humility that it is a trust and that in the most beautiful sense of the word he is only the stepfather. The father who has not felt this has always taken in vain his dignity as a father.
Let us spare ourselves all the misplaced commotion, “all the bowing and scraping with regard to childbirth,” but please spare me also your flippancy when, like Holberg’s Henrik,84 you want to pledge yourself to the incredible. A child is the greatest and the most significant thing in the world, the most unimpressive and most insignificant—all according to the way one looks at it, and we have an occasion to gain a deep insight into a person when we find out how he thinks in this regard. An infant can almost have a comic effect on one if one reflects on its pretensions to be a human being; it can have a tragic effect if one reflects on its coming into the world with a cry, that it takes a long time before it forgets to cry, and that no one has explained this infant crying. Thus the child can produce many effects, but the religious viewpoint, which can very well be combined with the others, remains the most beautiful. And now you, you certainly do love possibility, and yet the thought of children will surely not have a joyful effect upon you, for I do not doubt that your inquisitive and vagabond thoughts have peeked into this world also. Naturally this comes from your wanting to have the possibility in your power. You relish being in the situation children are in when they are waiting in the dark room for the revealing of the Christmas tree, but a child, to be sure, is an entirely different kind of possibility, and such an earnest one that you would hardly have the patience to bear it. And yet children are a blessing. It is beautiful and good that a man thinks with deep earnestness about the best for his children, but if he does not sometimes remember that it is not just a duty that is laid upon him, a responsibility, but that they also are a blessing, and that God in heaven has not forgotten what not even men forget, to lay a gift in the cradle, then he has not expanded his heart either [II 68] to esthetic or to religious feelings. The more a person is able to hold fast to the thought that children are a blessing, the fewer the battles and the less doubt with which he preserves this jewel, the only good that the infant possesses, but also lawfully, for God himself has placed it there, the more beautiful, the more esthetic, the more religious it is.
I, too, stroll the streets at times, lose myself in my own thoughts and in the impressions occasioned by the immediate surroundings. I have seen a poor woman—she had a little business, not in a shop or in a stall, but she stood in the open square; she stood there in rain and wind with a little one in her arms; she herself was neat and clean and her baby was carefully wrapped up. I have seen her many times. A fine lady came along who practically scolded her because she did not leave the child at home, and all the more so because it was just a hindrance to her. A clergyman came along the same street and approached her; he wanted to find a place for the child in an orphanage. She thanked him graciously, but you should have seen the way she looked down and gazed at the child. Had it been frozen, her look would have thawed it; had it been dead and cold, her look would have called it to life; had it been exhausted from hunger and thirst, the benediction of her look would have refreshed it. But the child slept, and not even its smile could reward the mother. You see, this woman perceived that a child is a blessing. If I were a painter, I would never paint anybody but this woman. A sight such as that is a rarity; it is like a rare flower that requires luck for a chance to see it. But the world of spirit is not under the dominion of futility;85 if one has found the tree, it blossoms continually; I have often seen her. I have pointed her out to my wife; I have not made myself important, have not sent her rich gifts, as if I had a divine carte blanche to pass out rewards; I have humbled myself under her. She really does not need either gold or fine ladies, or orphanages and clergymen, or a poor court-and-city judge and his wife. She needs nothing at all, except that the child will at some time love her with the same tenderness, and she does not need this either, but it is the reward she has deserved, a blessing that heaven will not fail to give her.
You cannot deny that this is beautiful, that it stirs even your calloused heart. Therefore, I shall not, in order to help you appreciate that a child is a blessing, resort to the terror tales people often use when they wish to frighten the unmarried person with the idea of how lonely he is going to be, how unhappy [II 69] not to be surrounded by a flock of children. For one thing, you probably would not allow yourself to be frightened, at least not by me—indeed, not by the whole world (when you are alone with yourself in the dark alcove of heavy thoughts, you no doubt sometimes become anxious about yourself). Then, too, it always strikes me as dubious to convince oneself one has a good thing by making others worried because they do not have it. So ridicule, then; speak, then, the words that hover on your lips—the four-seated Holsteiner carriage. Be amused, then, that the ride is no further than to “Fredsberg.”86 Drive past us, then, in your comfortable Vienna two-seater, but guard against indulging too often in your ridicule in this regard, for in your soul there might secretly develop an ideal longing that would punish you severely enough.
But children are a blessing in another sense also, for we ourselves learn so indescribably much through them. I have seen proud men whom no fate has hitherto humbled, who with such assurance snatched the girl they loved out of the family life to which she belonged that it was as if they would say: When you have me, that ought to be enough; I am accustomed to defy storms—how much more so now when the thought of you will inspire me, now when I have much more to fight for. I have seen the same men as fathers: a little mishap occurring to their children has been able to humble them; a sickness has been able to bring a prayer to their proud lips. I have seen men who took pride in practically disdaining the God who is in heaven, who made a habit of making every one who confessed him a target of their ridicule—I have seen them as fathers, out of solicitude for their children, take the most pious people into their employ. I have seen girls whose proud glance made Olympus quake,87 girls whose vain temperaments lived only for frills and frippery—I have seen them as mothers bear every humiliation, almost beg for what they believed was best for the children. I think of a specific instance. She was a very proud woman. Her child became ill. One of the city physicians was called. He refused to come because of a previous incident. I have seen her go to him, wait in his anteroom in order with her pleas to persuade him to come. But to what end are such intense portrayals, which, although true, still are not as upbuilding as the less emotional examples that are seen every day by the person who has eyes to see?
Then, too, we also learn much from children in another [II 70] way. In every child there is something original upon which all abstract principles and maxims more or less come to grief. A person must himself begin from the beginning, often with much trouble and effort. There is a profound meaning in the Chinese proverb: Bring up your children well, and you will come to know what you owe your parents. And now the responsibility that is placed on a father. We associate with other people, try to convey to them some conception of what we think is right, perhaps make several attempts; when it all proves futile, we have nothing more to do with them and wash our hands. But when does the moment come when a father dares—or, more correctly, when is a father-heart capable of deciding—to abandon any further attempt? The whole of life is experienced again in the children; only now does one understand one’s own life. But it really is futile to speak to you about this; there are things of which one can never have any substantial conception if one has not experienced them, and among these is being a father.
And now, finally, the beautiful way in which through children one makes a connection with a past and a future. Even if a person does not have fourteen noble ancestors and a concern to produce the fifteenth, he has a far greater kinship before him, and it is truly joyous to see how the line seems to take a specific pattern in families. To be sure, the unmarried person can also indulge in such observations, but he will not feel as encouraged or as entitled to do so, inasmuch as to a certain degree he himself is intervening disturbingly.
Or a man marries in order to have a home. He has become bored at home, has taken a trip abroad and become bored, has come home again and is bored. For the sake of company, he keeps an exceptionally beautiful water spaniel and a purebred mare, but he still lacks something. At the restaurant where a few congenial friends gather, he looks long and in vain for an acquaintance. He learns that the man has married. He becomes soft and sentimental about the old days; he feels the emptiness of everything around him—nobody is waiting for him when he is gone. The old housekeeper is really a very good-natured woman, but she knows nothing about cheering up a person and making things a little cozy. So he marries. The neighborhood claps its hands, considers that he has acted wisely and sensibly, and after that he joins in talking about the most important aspect of home management, the greatest earthly good: a good-natured and reliable cook one can allow to go to the market on her own, a handy maid who is so clever that she can be used for everything. Now, if only such a baldheaded [II 71] old hypocrite would be satisfied with marrying a night nurse—but usually that is not the case. The best is not good enough, and finally he manages to capture a beautiful young girl, who then is forged into a galley slave like this. Perhaps she has never been in love—what a horrible disproportion!
You see, I am letting you have your say. But you must admit that there are marriages, especially among the simpler classes, that are entered into for the purpose of having a home and are really beautiful. They are people in their earlier years. Not having knocked about in the world very much, they have reached the necessary income level and now consider getting married. It is beautiful, and I also know that it could never occur to you to direct your ridicule against such marriages. A certain noble simplicity gives them both an esthetic and a religious cast. There is nothing at all egotistic in the thought of wanting to have a home; on the contrary, for them the idea of a duty is attached to it, a task that is laid upon them, but which for them is also a pleasant duty.
Frequently enough, married people are also heard to comfort themselves and to alarm the unmarried by saying: Well, we do have a home, and when we grow older a place to stay. At times they add with a singular Sunday tone in the edifying style: Our children and grandchildren will some day close our eyes and grieve for us. The unmarried have the opposite fate. With a certain envy, it is admitted that they do have a better time for a while in their younger days; one secretly wishes not to be married yet oneself, but it comes soon enough. The unmarried are like the rich man:88 they have taken their share early in the game.
All marriages of that kind suffer from the mistake of making a particular feature of the marriage the purpose for marriage, and therefore they often feel deceived, especially those mentioned first, when they have to admit that marriage means little more than acquiring a comfortable, cozy, suitable home. But now let us once again disregard what is wrong in order to see the beautiful and the true. It is not given to everyone to operate on a very large scale, and many of those who imagine they are working for something great sooner or later find themselves laboring under a delusion.
This certainly does not mean you, for you, of course, are too intelligent not to get wind of the illusion at once, and your [II 72] ridicule has pilloried it often enough. In that regard, you have an extraordinary level of resignation and have once and for all manifested total renunciation [Renounce]. You prefer to amuse yourself. You are a welcome guest everywhere. Your wit, your ease in company, a certain goodnaturedness, as well as a certain maliciousness, prompt one to associate with the very sight of you the idea of a pleasant evening. You have always been and will always be a welcome guest in my house, partly because I am not very afraid of you, and partly because I have a good chance of not needing to begin to be afraid of you—my only daughter is but three years old, and you do not open your telegraphic communication with girls that young. You have sometimes half chided me for withdrawing more and more from the world, once, I remember, to the tune of “Tell me, Jeannette—.”89 The reason, of course, as I also replied to you that time, is that I have a home. In this respect, it is just as hard to get hold of you as of all the others—that is, you always have other plans.
If one wishes to strip people of their illusions in order to lead them to something more true, here as always you are “at your service in every way.” On the whole, you are tireless in tracking down illusions in order to smash them to pieces. You talk so sensibly, with such experience, that anyone who does not know you better must believe that you are a steady man. But you have by no means arrived at what is true. You stopped with destroying the illusion, and since you did it in every conceivable direction, you actually have worked your way into a new illusion—that one can stop with this. Yes, my friend, you are living in an illusion, and you are achieving nothing.
Here I have spoken the word that has always had such a strange effect on you. Achieve—”so who is achieving something? That is precisely one of the most dangerous illusions. I do not busy myself in the world at all; I amuse myself the best I can, and I am particularly amused by those people who believe that they are achieving something, and is it not indescribably funny that a person believes that? I refuse to burden my life with such grandiose pretensions.”
Every time you talk about this you have a very disagreeable effect on me. It disturbs me because there is in it an implicit brash untruth, which, delivered with your virtuosity, always scores a success, at least always brings the laughter to your [II 73] side.90 I remember one occasion when you, after listening for a long time to a man who had been upset by what you said, without answering him a word but merely egging him on with your sarcastic smile, finally responded to the universal delight of those present: Well, if you add this speech to everything else you have achieved, we at least cannot blame you for believing that you are really achieving something in general and in particular. It pains me when you talk that way, because I feel a certain pity for you.91 If you do not restrain yourself, with you will perish a richly endowed nature. This is why you are dangerous. This is why your sallies and your coldness have a potency I have not seen in anyone else of the many who dabble in the profession of being discontented. As a matter of fact, you do not belong with them; they are the butt of your satire, for you have gone much further. “You are happy and contented, you smile, you wear your hat at a jaunty angle, you do not overstrain yourself on the sorrows of life; as yet you have not become a member of any threefold lamentation society.” But that is precisely why your remarks are so dangerous for young people, because they must be struck by the mastery you have won over everything in the world. Now I am not going to tell you that a person must achieve something in life, but I will ask if there still are not some specific things in your life over which you cast an impenetrable veil; might they not be of the kind in which you wanted to achieve something, even though your depression groans in pain because it is so little? And how altogether different does it not appear within you! Is there not still a profound sorrow over your not achieving anything? I know at least one situation; you dropped a few words about it that did not go unheeded. Undoubtedly you would give everything to be able to achieve something. Whether it is your own fault that you cannot, whether it is your pride that has to be crushed in order to be capable of it, I do not know, and I shall never intrude further upon you, but why do you nevertheless maintain partnership with all that bad lot that really revels in your ability to score a victory every time.
As I said before, one often enough feels how little one achieves in the world. I do not say this despondently. I really have nothing for which to chide myself; I believe that I administer my office conscientiously and cheerfully, and I shall never be tempted to become involved in anything that is none of my business in the hope of achieving more. But nevertheless it is a very circumscribed activity, and it is only in faith that one has the assurance that one is achieving anything. But then along [II 74] with this I have my home. In this respect, I often think of Jesus Sirach’s beautiful words, which I shall also ask you to ponder: “He who acquires a wife begins to acquire his best possessions, for he has acquired a helper and a support to rest upon. Where there is no fence, the property will be plundered; and where there is no wife, a man will sigh and be as one who wanders about. For who will trust an armed robber who skips from city to city? So who will trust a man who has no home, and lodges wherever night finds him?”92
I have not married in order to have a home, but I have a home, and this is a great blessing. I am not—and I believe you will not go so far as to call me—a fool of a husband; I am not my wife’s husband in the sense in which the Queen of England has a husband. My wife is not the slave woman in Abraham’s house, whom I banish with the child,93 but neither is she a goddess with whom I wheel around in amorous capers. I have a home, and this home certainly is not everything to me; but this I do know, that I have been everything to my wife, partly because she in all humility has believed it, partly because I personally know that I have been and will be that as far as it is possible for a person to be that to another. Here I am able to enlighten you concerning the beauty in a person’s being able to be everything to another without a reminder of it by any finite or specific thing whatsoever. I can speak all the more boldly on this point, for she surely does not stand in the shadows. She did not need me; the one I married was not a poor girl for whom I did a good deed—as the world says in all possible contempt for itself. She was not an affected silly whom I married for other reasons and of whom I have now made something good through my wisdom. She was independent and, what is more, so contented that she did not need to let herself be sold; she was sound, sounder than I, even though more intense. Her life, of course, could never be as active as mine or as reflective; with my experience I perhaps could save her from many a mistake, but her soundness made that superfluous. Truly, she owes me nothing, and yet I am everything to her. She has not needed me, but I have not therefore been unimportant. I have guarded her and still sleep, like Nehemiah, with my weapon at my side94—to repeat a phrase that slipped out of my mouth on a similar occasion and to show you that I have not forgotten [II 75] your sarcastic remark that it must be quite a gêne [inconvenience] to my wife. My young friend, such remarks do not bother me, as you can see from the fact that I repeat it and, I assure you, without anger. Thus I have been altogether nothing and yet everything to her. You, however, have been everything to a goodly number of people, and yet basically you have been nothing at all to them. And just suppose that in the temporary contacts you have with people you were able to supply someone or other with such a treasure of the interesting, were able to prompt so much creativity in himself that he would have sufficient for his lifetime, something that, after all, is presumably impossible, but just suppose he really gained through you—you yourself, you would lose, for you nevertheless would have found no individual for whom you could wish to be everything, and even if this is part of your greatness, then this greatness is really so distressing that I pray God to spare me it.
In order to divest oneself of every unsound and despicable idea of comfort, this is the idea one must first and foremost link to the home, that it is a task. Even in the husband’s enjoyment there ought to be an element of task,95 even if this does not manifest itself in a specific external tangible task. In this respect, the husband can be very active although he does not appear to be, whereas the wife’s domestic activity is more visible.
But next there is such a concretion of details linked to the idea of a home that it is very difficult to say anything about them in general. In this respect, every household has its distinctiveness, and it might be very interesting to know a number of them. But of course it holds true that every such distinctiveness is permeated by a certain mentality, and I for one am revolted by all this separatistic odious practice in families that deliberately starts right off to show how exclusive everything is with them, which sometimes goes so far that the family speaks its own private language or speaks in such mysterious allusions that one cannot make heads or tails out of them. The point is that the family does possess such a distinctiveness—the art is to know how to hide it.
Those who marry to have a home always plead that there is no one who is waiting for them, no one who welcomes them, etc. This adequately indicates that they actually have a home only when they think of being outside it. Thank God, I never need to go out in order to remember or to forget that I have a home. Often the feeling of having a home comes over me suddenly [II 76] when I least expect it. I do not need to go into either the living room or the dining room to be sure of it. Often this feeling can come over me when I am sitting all alone in my study. It can come over me when the door of my room opens and a moment later I see a lively face at the door pane and the curtain is closed again, and there is a very soft knock at the door, and after that a head peeks through the door in such a way that one could believe that the head did not belong to any body, and then in a flash she is standing by my side and vanishes again. This home-feeling can come over me late at night when I am sitting all alone as in the old days in my college room; then, I may light my lamp, tiptoe softly into her bedroom to see if she is really sleeping. Of course, this feeling often comes over me when I come home. And when I have rung the doorbell she knows that it is at the time I usually come home (we poor bureaucrats are so handicapped in this way that we are unable to surprise our wives), she recognizes the way I usually ring—then when I hear the noise and clamor of children inside, and of her as well, for she heads this little flock and is herself so childlike that she seems to compete with the children in shouting with joy—then I feel that I have a home. And then if I look serious (you talk so much about being a connoisseur of human nature, but who knows human nature the way a woman does!), how this almost exuberant child changes; she does not become desperate, does not feel bad, but there is a power in her that is not hard but is infinitely flexible, like a sword that could bite stone and yet is coiled around the waist. Or if she can see that I am a bit irritable (good Lord, that also happens), how accommodating she can be, and yet how much superiority there is in this accommodating.
Whatever else I might wish to say to you on this occasion I prefer to link to a particular expression I believe can be properly applied to you, an expression you yourself often use: that you are a stranger and an alien in the world.96 Younger men, who have no conception of the high price paid for experience, but who also have no intimation of its inexpressible wealth, can easily be sucked into the same whirlpool, can perhaps feel influenced by what you say as by a fresh wind that coaxes them out onto the infinite sea that you show to them. You yourself can become youthfully intoxicated, almost beyond control, by the thought of this infinity that is your element, an element that like the ocean conceals everything unchanged in its [II 77] depths. Should not you, who already are an experienced man in these waters, know how to tell of disaster and distress at sea?
Of course, on this ocean one person usually does not know much about another. One does not fit out huge vessels such as are launched with difficulty out on the deep. No, one fits out very small boats, jolly boats for one person only. One seizes the moment, unfurls one’s sail, sweeps along with the infinite speed of restless thoughts, alone on the infinite ocean, alone under the infinite heaven. This life is dangerous, but one is intimate with the thought of losing it, for it is a real joy to vanish into the infinite in such a way that just enough remains so that one enjoys this vanishing. Seafarers tell that out on the great oceans of the world there is seen a kind of vessel called the Flying Dutchman. It can spread a little sail and with infinite speed sweep over the surface of the ocean. This is just about the way you navigate on the ocean of life.
Alone in his kayak,97 a person is sufficient unto himself, has nothing to do with any person except when he himself so wishes. Alone in his kayak, a person is sufficient unto himself—but I cannot really understand how this emptiness can be filled, but since you are the only person among my acquaintances about whom this is true to a degree, I also know that you do have a person on board who can help fill up the time. You should say, therefore: Alone in one’s boat, alone with one’s sorrow, alone with one’s despair—which one is cowardly enough to prefer to keep rather than to submit to the pain of healing. Allow me to point out the dark side of your life—not as if I wished to make you fearful; I do not have anything to do with playing the bogeyman, and you are too clever to let yourself be affected by such things. But nevertheless think of the pain, sadness, and humiliation involved in being in this sense a stranger and an alien in the world.
I will not confuse the impression I can possibly make on you by irritating you with the thought of turbid family solidarity, the barn air you detest; but think of family life in its beauty, founded on a deep and intimate community in such a way that what joins it all together is still mysteriously hidden, the one relationship ingeniously entwined with the other so that one has only an intimation of the coherence; think of this family’s concealed internal life, clad in such a beautiful external form that one nowhere encounters the hardness of the joints—and now contemplate your relation to such a family. A family like that would appeal particularly to you, and you perhaps would enjoy visiting them often and because of your ease would soon be as if on terms of intimacy with them. I say “as if,” for it is [II 78] clear that you cannot possibly be on such terms, since you will always remain a stranger and an alien. They would regard you as a welcome guest, perhaps would be friendly enough to make everything as pleasant as possible for you; the members of the family would be courteous to you—indeed, they would treat you as one treats a child one likes. And you—you would be inexhaustible in attentiveness, inventive in all ways of delighting the family. It would be very lovely, would it not, and presumably in some odd moment you might be tempted to say that you really did not care to see the family in houserobes, or the daughter in bedroom slippers, or the wife without her cap, and yet, if you look more closely, there is an enormous humiliation for you in the family’s correct behavior toward you. Every family would have to behave in this way, and you would become the humiliated one. Or do you not believe that the family conceals a totally different life of its own, which is its shrine; do you not believe that every family still has household gods, even if it does not place them in the front hall? And does not your comment conceal a very refined weakness, for I truly do not believe that you could stand to see your wife—if you ever were to marry—in dishabille, unless this costume were finery designed to please you. You no doubt think that you have done much to entertain the family, to cast a certain esthetic sheen over it, but suppose the family did not think much of this in comparison with the inner life it has. So it would go with you in relation to every family, and no matter how proud you are, there is a humiliation involved here.
No one shares his grief with you; no one confides in you. You no doubt think that it often is the case that you have indeed gained a wealth of psychological observations, but this is often an illusion, for people are quite willing to chat casually with you and remotely touch on or drop a hint of a concern, because the interesting that thereby stirs in you soothes the pain and in itself already has a charm that makes one desire this medicine, even without needing it. And if someone approached you precisely because of your isolated position (as you know, people would rather speak with a mendicant friar than with their father confessor), it still would never truly mean anything, neither for you nor for him; not for him because [II 79] he would sense the arbitrariness implicit in confiding in you; not for you because you would not be able to disregard entirely the ambiguity in which your competence rested. You are undeniably a good operator; you know how to penetrate into the most secret enclosures of sorrow and care, yet in such a way that you do not forget the way back. Well, now, I assume that you succeeded in healing your patient, but you had no genuine and deep joy from it, for the whole thing had an air of arbitrariness and you had no responsibility.
Only responsibility gives a blessing and true joy, and it does so even if one cannot do it half as well as you; it often gives a blessing when one does nothing at all.98 But when one has a home, then one has a responsibility, and in itself this responsibility gives security and joy. Precisely because you do not want to have responsibility you must find it entirely in order that people are ungrateful to you—something that you frequently complain about. You, however, rarely have anything to do with healing people; as I told you before, generally your main occupation tends to destroy illusions and occasionally to maneuver people into illusions. When one sees you with one or two young men, how with a few motions you have already helped them a considerable distance beyond all the childish, and in many ways helpful, illusions, how they now become lighter than actuality, how their wings shoot out, while you yourself, like an old and experienced bird, give them an idea of what a wing stroke is, whereby one can fly over all of existence; or when you conduct the same training of young girls and compare the differences in flights, how one hears the wing beat in masculine flight, whereas feminine flight is like rowing dreamily—when one sees this, who then because of your skill can be angry with you, but who because of your wanton irresponsibility ought not to be angry with you. You can certainly say of your heart what the old song says:
Mein Herz ist wie ein Taubenhaus:
Die Eine fliegt herein, die Andre fliegt heraus
[My heart is like a dovecote:
The one flies in, the other flies out],99
except that as far as you are concerned one does not see them fly in as much as one sees new ones continually flying out. But a dovecote, no matter how beautiful a symbol of a quiet domestic [II 80] home it is, must really not be used in this way.
Is it not painful and sad just to let life go by in this way without ever finding solidity in it; is it not sad, my young friend, that life never acquires content for you. There is something sad in the feeling that one is growing older, but it is a much more profound sadness that comes over a person if he cannot grow old. At this very moment, I feel how justified I am in calling you “my young friend.” A distance of seven years is certainly no eternity; I am not going to praise myself for maturity of understanding superior to yours, but I certainly do for a maturity of life. Yes, I feel that I have really grown older, but you still continually cling to the initial surprise of youth. And if at times, even though seldom, I feel world-weary, that, too, is bound together with a quiet sublimation—I think of those beautiful words: Blessed are they who rest from their labors.100 I do not delude myself into thinking that I have had a great task in life; I have not rejected what was assigned to me. And even if it was insignificant, it has also been my task to be happy in it, although it was insignificant. You certainly do not rest from your labor; for your rest is a curse—you can live only in restlessness. Rest is your opposite; rest makes you more restless. You are like a starving man whom eating only makes more hungry, a thirsty man whom drinking only makes more thirsty.
But I go back to the preceding discussion, to the finite objectives for which people enter marriage. I have mentioned only three because they always seem to be of some relevance, because they do nevertheless reflect upon one or another particular element in marriage, although in their one-sidedness they become just as ludicrous as they are unesthetic and irreligious. I make no mention of a multiplicity of altogether puny objectives, because they are not even laughable. For example, marrying for money, or out of jealousy, or because of the prospects, because there is the prospect that she will soon die—or that she will live a long time but become a well-favored branch that bears much fruit, so that through her one can sweep the property of a whole row of deceased uncles and aunts into one’s pocket. I do not care to bring up all such things.
As a result of this exploration, I can stress here that marriage, [II 81] in order to be esthetic and religious, must have no finite “why,” but this was precisely the esthetic in the first love, and thus here again marriage stands au niveau [on a level] with first love. And this is the esthetic in marriage—that it hides in itself a multiplicity of “whys” that life discloses in all its blessedness.
But since I set out primarily to show the esthetic validity of marriage, and since that whereby marriage was distinguished from first love was the ethical and the religious, but in turn the ethical and religious, insofar as they seek their expression in something particular, find this best in the marriage ceremony, I shall dwell on this subject—lest I seem to treat the matter too lightly, lest I make myself the least bit guilty of seeming to be hiding the schism between first love and marriage that you and many others, even though for different reasons, stipulate. You may be right in saying that if a host of people do not take exception to this schism, the reason is that they lack the energy and education to reflect on either the one or the other. Meanwhile, let us take a closer look at the marriage ceremony and its formulations. Perhaps you will discover that I am also well armed in what I am about to say, and of that I can assure you without incommoding my wife, for she quite approves of my holding off freebooters such as you and your ilk. Moreover, I think that, just as a Christian always ought to be able to explain his faith,101 so also a married man ought to be able to explain his marriage, not simply to anyone who deigns to ask, but to anyone he thinks worthy of it, or even if, as in casu [in this case], unworthy, he finds it propitious to do so. And since of late you, having devastated a host of other landscapes, are about to ravage the province of marriage, I feel called upon to challenge you.
That you are acquainted with the formulary of the wedding ceremony, have indeed made a study of it, I assume. On the whole, you are always well armed for war and usually never begin to attack something before you are just as well informed about it as its most tested defenders. This is why it sometimes happens, as you yourself lament, that your attacks are too good and that those who are supposed to defend are not as well informed as you who are attacking. Now we shall see.
But before going to the particular question, let us see if there [II 82] is anything disturbing in the wedding ceremony itself considered only as ceremony. After all, the wedding ceremony is not something the lovers themselves thought up in an opulent moment, something they could abandon if they thought of something else along the way. Hence, it is a power that we encounter. But does love need to acknowledge any power other than itself? You perhaps are willing to admit that as soon as doubt and concern have taught a person to pray he would put up with bowing to such a power, but first love does not need that. Please remember that we have assumed the individuals under consideration to be religiously developed. Therefore, I am not discussing how the religious can make its way in a person but how it can co-exist with first love, and just as unhappy love can make a person religious, just as surely religious individuals are able to love. The religious is not so alien to human nature that there must first be a break in order to awaken it. But if the individuals involved are religious, then the power that they encounter in the wedding ceremony is not alien, and just as their love unites them in a higher unity, so the religious lifts them up in a still higher unity.
What does the wedding ceremony do, then? First of all, it gives an overview of the genesis of the human race and thereby binds the new marriage in the great body of the human race. It thereby provides the universal, the purely human, calls it forth in the consciousness. This jars on you; you perhaps say: It is distasteful to be reminded, at the very moment one is uniting so intimately with another person, that everything else vanishes, that es ist eine alte Geschichte [it is an old story],102 something that has happened, is happening, and will happen. You wish to delight precisely in that which is unique in your love, you want to have the full passion of love blaze up in you, and you do not want to be disturbed by the thought that every Tom, Dick, and Harry is doing the same thing. “It is extremely prosaic to be reminded of one’s statistical significance: In the year 1750, at ten o’clock, Mr. John Doe and demure Miss Jane Doe, and at eleven o’clock the same day, Mr. John Doe and Miss Jane Doe.” Now this sounds quite terrible, but hiding in your argument is a reflection that has disturbed first love.
As noted previously, love is a union of the universal and the [II 83] particular, but to want to enjoy the particular, in the sense in which you do, evidences a reflection that places the particular outside the universal. The more the universal and the particular penetrate each other, the more beautiful the love. The greatness is not in being the particular either in the immediate or in the higher sense but in possessing the universal in the particular. Therefore, to be reminded of the universal cannot be a disturbing introduction to first love. The wedding ceremony also does more than that; namely, in order to refer to the universal it leads the lovers back to the first parents. Consequently, it does not stop with the universal in abstracto but shows it as manifested in the first couple of the human race. This is a clue to the nature of every marriage. Like every human life, every marriage is simultaneously this particular and nevertheless the whole, simultaneously individual and symbol. Consequently, it gives the lovers the most beautiful picture of two human beings who are not disturbed by reflection about others; it says to the two individuals: You also are a couple just like them; the same event is being repeated here in you, and you also are standing here alone in the infinite world, alone in the presence of God. Therefore, you see that the wedding ceremony does provide what you are demanding, but it also provides more in simultaneously providing the universal and the particular.
“But the wedding ceremony declares that sin has entered into the world, and it certainly is discordant to be reminded so emphatically of sin at the very moment one feels most pure. Thereupon it teaches that sin entered the world along with marriage, and this is hardly encouraging to those being married. The Church, of course, can wash its hands of any eventual distressing outcome, for it has not indulged them in any vain hope.” That the Church does not indulge in a vain hope certainly ought to be regarded in and by itself as something good. Furthermore, the Church declares that sin came into the world along with marriage and yet permits it; the Church declares that sin came along with marriage, but whether it teaches that this was on account of marriage could still be very problematic. In any case, it proclaims sin only as man’s universal lot, does not apply it specifically to the single individual, and least of all does it say: You are now about to commit a sin. To be sure, it is a very difficult matter to explain in what sense sin came along with marriage; here sin and the sensuous might seem to be regarded as identical. But that certainly cannot be the case, inasmuch as the Church allows marriage.103 Yes, you will say—but not until it has removed all the beauty out of [II 84] earthly love. To which I would respond: By no means—at least there is not a word about that in the wedding ceremony.
The Church next declares the punishment of sin, that the woman shall bear children in pain and be subservient to her husband. But the first of these consequences is of such a nature that even if the Church did not declare it, it would declare itself. Yes, you answer, but the disturbing thing about it is that it is asserted to be the result of sin. You find it to be esthetically beautiful that a child is born in pain; it shows regard for a human being, is a symbolic mark of the significance it indeed has that a human being comes into the world, in contrast to the animals, which, the lower they are on the scale, bring their young into the world with all the greater ease. Here I must again emphasize that it is declared as the universal destiny of humankind, and that a child is born in sin is the most profound expression of its highest worth, that it is precisely a transfiguration of human life that everything related to it is assigned to the category of sin.104
Then it says that the woman shall be subservient to her husband. Here you will perhaps say: Well, now, that is beautiful, and it has always appealed to me to see a woman who in her husband loved her master. But that this is supposed to be a consequence of sin shocks you, and you feel called upon to come forward as the chivalrous champion of the woman. Whether you are doing her a service thereby, I shall leave undecided, but I do believe that you have not grasped in all its inwardness the essence of woman, part of which is that she is simultaneously more perfect and more imperfect than the man. If we wish to characterize the most pure and perfect, we say “a woman”; if we wish to characterize the weakest and most fragile, we say “a woman”; if we want to convey a conception of the spirituality elevated above the sensuous, we say “a woman”; if we want to convey a conception of the sensuous, we say “a woman”; if we wish to characterize innocence in all its uplifting greatness, we say “a woman”; if we wish to characterize the depressing feeling of guilt, we say “a woman.” Thus in a certain sense woman is more perfect than man, and Scripture expresses this by saying that she has more guilt.105 If you recall again that the Church declares only the universal human lot of woman, then I do not discern that anything disquieting can eventuate for first love, although admittedly for the reflection that does not know how to maintain her in this possibility. Moreover, the Church certainly does not [II 85] make woman a mere slave; it says: “And God said I will make a companion for Adam,”106 an expression that has just as much esthetic warmth as it has truth. This is why the Church teaches: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife.”107 We would rather have expected it to read: The woman shall leave her father and mother and cleave to her husband—for the woman, after all, is weaker than the man. In the expression of Scripture there is an implicit recognition of the woman’s significance, and no knight could be more chivalrous toward her.108
Finally, with regard to the curse that fell to the man’s lot, the circumstance that he must eat his bread in the sweat of his brow certainly seems to chase him, with a single sentence, out of the honeymoon days109 of first love. That this curse, like all divine curses, as we are often reminded, conceals a blessing proves nothing at this point, inasmuch as the experience of it is always reserved for a future time. I do want to remind you, however, that first love is not cowardly, that it does not fear dangers, and that it will not for that reason see in this curse a difficulty that can terrify it.
What does the wedding ceremony do, then? “It halts the lovers.” Not at all—but it allows what was already in motion to appear in the external world. It affirms the universally human, and in this sense sin also, but all the anxiety and torment that wishes that sin had never come into the world is based on a reflection that first love does not know.110 To wish that sin had never entered the world is to lead mankind back to the more imperfect. Sin has come in, but when the individuals have humbled themselves under this, they stand higher than they stood before.