De tous les maux, le mien differe;
Il me plait; je me réjouis de lui;
Mon mal est ce que je veux
Et ma douleur est ma santé!
Je ne vois donc pas de quoi je me plains,
Car mon mal me vient de ma volonté;
C’est mon vouloir que devient mon mal,
Mais j’ai tant d’case à vouloir ainsi
Que je souffre agréablement,
Et tans de joie dans ma douleur
Que je suis malade avec délices.
From all ills mine differs;
It pleasures me; I rejoice in it;
My illness is what I want
And my pain is my health!
I don’t see, then, of what I complain,
For my illness comes to me of my own will;
It is my own wish that becomes my ill,
But I find so much pleasure in wishing thus
That I suffer agreeably,
And so much joy within my pain
That I am sick with delight
—Chrétien de Troyes
These are the words of one of the greatest poets of the age of troubadours, the voice of one who first recorded some of the greatest “romances” in out early romantic literature. How perfectly he captures the strange, unacknowledged connection between romance and suffering! Suffering seems to be an inseparable part of romance, as every man and woman knows who has been in love. We can try to evade it, we sometimes imagine that we have escaped it, but it always awaits us in the place we least suspect. Even our word passion originally meant “to suffer.”
The suffering is as though designed into romance by our ancestors, who, unlike us, actually saw romance as a spiritual discipline. By teaching us to seek, in a woman or a man, an ideal of perfection that could never be incarnated in mortal flesh, they sentenced us to a seemingly endless cycle of impossible expectations followed by bitter disappointments.
But there is more to it than that: It is also true that unconsciously we seek our suffering! Like Tristan, we seem unconsciously to go out of our way to set up impossible situations, to become involved with impossible people, to impose expectations on our relationships that can’t possibly be met. We pursue our suffering as though it were a necessary part of romantic experience, as though we could not do without it. Unconsciously we seem to delight in it: “It pleasures me; I rejoice in it.” If my wishes are impossible, if they bring me more pain than ecstasy, nevertheless, “I find so much pleasure in wishing thus that I suffer agreeably, and so much joy within my pain that I am sick with delight.”
There is much to be learned by looking at the poetry and the romances of our ancestors, for they had the grace to state bluntly the truths that we are unwilling to face. If we can open our minds and learn from them to say what is, then we can begin to understand what forces are at work in us. It is no coincidence that all romantic literature, from Tristan and Iseult to Romeo and Juliet and up to the present, is filled with suffering and death. The very nature of romance seems to require that it be lived in the face of impossible odds, terrible obstacles, and inhuman adversities. Finding their romance impossible in this physical world, many of the archetypal lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, choose to die together.
What is this idealism that is so strong that it chooses death and the hope of another world rather than accept a less perfect life on this earth? What is it in this suffering that attracts us so powerfully that we always return to the flame, no matter how many times we are burned? This is what we ask as we look at the suffering and death of Tristan and Iseult.
On his wedding night, the ring of green jasper falls from Tristan’s finger and clatters on the stones. That moment is the final great turning point in Tristan’s life. He decides that, in order to be true to the inner ideal represented by Iseult the Fair, he must reject his wife. “And now what pity I feel for my wife, for her trust and her simple heart. See how these two Iseults have met me in an evil hour! and to each I have broken faith!”
In that moment an iron door shuts on half of Tristan’s nature. Tristan decides to refuse his wife, and in the same act he gives up life itself. From that moment to his final day, he seems only to wait for the death that he believes will unite him, at last, with his ideal, his dream, his vision of perfection, his soul—all incarnated in Iseult the Fair.
He gives up all earthly love with Iseult of the White Hands; he will serve only the divine love, and he looks for his soul in the Queen. But Tristan and Iseult do not find their souls in each other. Ultimately they find in each other only a tormenting reflection of the divine realm that they hope to find on the other side of the grave. Tristan is doubly unhappy, for he has lost both Iseults. He has lost the enjoyment of earthly life with his wife, and by refusing to make a nonphysical relationship to Iseult the Fair, he has also lost his relationship with her. He can not have her in the way he demands. He has lost his inner life, and he despairs of ever finding it except by dying and meeting Iseult the Fair in heaven.
Had we looked, we could have seen Death approaching very early. The two lovers were already calling to Him when they stood beneath the tall pine-tree, longing for a perfect place where they could live their romantic vision. We could hear the longing in Tristan’s voice as he spoke of the “other world”:
“But one day, friend, we shall go together to a fortunate land from which none returns. There, rises a castle of white marble; at each of its thousand windows burns a lighted candle; at each a minstrel plays and sings a melody without end…”
And hear again the words of Tristan as he stands before the King playing the fool, asking for the Queen. Where will he take her?
“Oh! very high, between the clouds and heaven, into a fair chamber glazed. The beams of the sun shine through it, yet the winds do not trouble it at all. There would I bear the Queen in to that crystal chamber of mine, all compact of roses and the morning.”
Where can such a beautiful land exist? How can we find our way there? Tristan plans to make the journey there by the dark path of death. As he takes leave of the Queen for the last time, he makes his appointment with her, their mutual appointment with death. He utters the prophecy that reveals his intention: “My death is near, and far from you my death will come of desire.”
And Iseult answers:
“O friend, fold your arms round me and strain me so that our hearts may break and our souls go free at last. Take me to that happy place of which you told me long ago. The fields whence none return, but where great singers sing their songs for ever….”
“I will take you to the Happy Palace of the living, Queen!” Tristan says. “The time is near. When it is finished, if I call you, will you come, my friend?”
Finally, when Tristan lies poisoned by the spear, he puts the ring of green jasper into Kaherdin’s hand and sends him to Iseult with this message: “Say she must come, for we drank our death together.”
Indeed, they drank their death together, and as the end approaches, death seems to be the object of all their longing. Their despair on earth is made bearable only by the perfection, beauty, and happiness of the world to come. But what is this glorious land of white marble castles and rosy chambers, this “Happy Palace of the living”?
This perfect and beautiful realm can only be the inner world. We all instinctively know of this world; we resonate with these lovers’ words; their longing sets up a sympathetic vibration in our souls. It is the fairy-tale land, the world of imagination where the soul holds secret court with the gods. But why is this inner world of soul symbolized by Death? Why do Tristan and Iseult believe that they can only go there by the pathways of the dead?
From primordial times death has been conceived as a “going free” from the limited physical realm of time and space into the unlimited and measureless universe of spirit and eternity. This “liberation” from the physical is, for the unconscious, a symbol of something yet more subtle: the liberation of ego from the bounds of its tiny world and its petty viewpoint, into the vast, unbound, inner universe of psyche. Freed from literalism, death is not the end, but a symbol of profound change, of transformation.
The “land of death” is the inner world of the soul. The deepest meaning of death, experienced in the depths of the unconscious, is as symbol of transformation: the transformation of the ego that enters into the realm of the psyche, meets and joins with the soul, and consents to give up its tiny empire in order to live in the immensity of the greater universe.
To understand this opens a whole new vista for us: It is transformation that is required of us—not death! This is what is symbolized over and over in the great tales of romance, using “death” as symbol. This is the one solution to the conflicts, the confused loyalties, and the terrible sufferings of romance. The only true resolution is a change of consciousness and a change of values.
Even so, a real “death” awaits us within the transformative experience: It is the death of ego. By “death of ego” we do not mean that the ego evaporates or disappears. We mean that the ego makes a sacrifice of its old world, its old point of view, its old, ingrained attitudes. When a new set of values come into life and a new synthesis becomes possible, it most destroy the old world order of ego: Ego can only feel it as “death.”
If ego takes this death as a threat, then it resists and fights the change. We all do this in romantic love; even when we see that we need to transform our values in order to experience the true revelation in romantic love, we still feel threatened: We still cling to our old attitudes, impose the same old demands on other people, and try to live out our fantasies of romance on the same old levels. To change, to question our own opinions, to alter our patterns, feels like impending disaster. This is the “death of the ego,” the death that awaits us within transformation.
In Tristan’s day, they took the symbol literally: They believed that they would only find the world of soul and spirit by dying, by leaving this physical body. Yet in one way they were wiser than we: They were more conscious of, and more direct about, what they sought in romantic love. The Cathars and troubadours flatly stated that they were seeking the transformation, that they were seeking it through passionate love and through death. Death, because it released them from the slavery of the flesh. Passion, because, in its otherworldly intensity, in both its ecstasy and its suffering, they saw a foretaste of the divine world. Romantic love was for them an initiation. The passion of love was thought to spiritualize the elect in anticipation of the final passion; it incinerated the human life that separates us from “the fields whence none return.”
We are not so direct; we are unconscious of what we seek. But we have inherited the same beliefs. We walk through life longing for a transfiguring experience, the vision that will give our lives meaning and wholeness: We are searching for our souls, searching for the divine world. But we don’t know how to experience the gods inwardly, on the symbolic level. Unconsciously, impulsively, like men and women possessed, we seek it in passion, falling in love, delivering ourselves over to a power that envelopes us and possesses us. It is ecstasy, it is suffering, it is a kind of death, but most of all it is a taste of what used to be sought in the afterlife: transfiguration. It is death and rebirth: One is dead to the world and alive to a realm that is bigger than life. As long as the passion lasts, so long as the projection can be maintained, this is what one feels. And this, above all, is what one seeks.
Tristan believes there are two ways he can touch the inner world: first, through the suffering and ecstasy of his passion for Iseult the Fair; second, by literal death, by leaving this physical world. We modern Westerners have reduced the options still more; most of us seek the inner world in only one place—romantic passion. Why is this?
Partly, it is our Western dualism, the division of life in two: physical life on earth, spiritual life in the sky. Both Catharism and medieval Christianity teach Tristan that earth is nothing, that the spiritual life can only be found in the afterlife, in “heaven.” This belief has become, in our minds, the unconscious idea that the spiritual side of life is always “somewhere else” or “over there.” It is always somewhere other than where I am, someplace other than within my own life. We Westerners don’t really believe that we can experience our gods and our spiritual life as an inner experience while pursuing our ordinary daily lives on earth. It is hard for us to think of the two worlds, inner and outer, coexisting simultaneously in one human being. This is why we always try to embody the divine world in something or someone outside ourselves.
Another reason for seeking our inner world in romantic love is simply that Westerners don’t believe in the inner world; therefore, whatever we do with that unlived side of ourselves has to be unconscious, has to be projected out into the physical world. The fact of a nonphysical inner world is a difficult idea for Western people. We talk about inward realities, we talk of “soul” and “spirit,” but we don’t really believe in them. Over the centuries we have lost contact with the inner life and with its symbolism as our culture has turned ever more literal and materialist. In this area, we have actually done a reverse evolution.
In Tristan’s time most men thought of “soul” and “spirit” as quasiphysical entities, only slightly more subtle than the physical body; they had to be located in a literal physical body or in a “place”—a “limbo” or a “heaven.” They thought of heaven as a literal physical place, rather than a state of being, and actually spent centuries speculating over heaven’s location in the physical universe!
Even several centuries after Tristan, in Galileo’s day, the profession of astonomer was very dangerous because most people were convinced that the divine world was located “out there” among the stars and planets. Galileo was branded a heretic because he saw something through his telescope that contradicted that idea.
We haven’t evolved much further in our own century. Our religion is romance: We locate the divine world in physical people—the people with whom we fall in love. And any psychologist who asserts (after consulting his telescope) that the divine world can’t really be found in romance is likely to make people angry and be branded a spoilsport, if not a heretic.
Now we have found the secret cipher that decodes “suffering and death.” We begin to see that the “death” we seek in romantic love is transformation, the end of the old world, the searing touch of the fire that slays and gives new life in the same instant. The suffering of romance is ultimately no different than the suffering of mysticism and religion: It is the pain shared by all mortals who would give birth to the divine world within their own lives, within this physical life and its finite limits.
Why is it that we delight most of all in some tale of impossible love? Because we long for the branding; because we long to grow aware of what is on fire inside us. Suffering and understanding are deeply connected; death and self-awareness are in league; and European romanticism may be compared to a man to whom sufferings, and especially the sufferings of love, are a privileged mode of understanding. (de Rougemont, Love in the Western World).
Suffering is the inevitable path that must be trod on the way to consciousness, the inevitable price for the transformation we seek. By no means can we escape it; we who try to evade it never succeed; and we are twice unlucky, for we pay the price, anyway, but miss our transformation. There is a terrible and immutable law at work: We only transform when we take our suffering consciously and voluntarily; to attempt to evade only puts us into the karmic cycles that repeat endlessly and produce nothing.
This, then, is why we suffer, and this is why, unconsciously, we even seek to suffer: “Because we long for the branding; because we long to grow aware of what is on fire inside us.”
But freedom is given to us to choose how to take our suffering. Most people take it unconsciously. This is why suffering usually seems to lead nowhere, to produce only pain; this is why romance often seems to be a meaningless cycle: We fall in love, we set up our ideal of perfection, and in time, we are bitterly disappointed. We suffer. We follow our projections about, always searching for the one who will match the impossible ideal and will magically give us our transformation. And when we don’t find the divine world where we search—in a human being—we suffer; we fall into despair.
But if we take our suffering consciously, voluntarily, then it gives us something in return; it produces the true transformation. To suffer consciously means to live through the “death of ego,” to voluntarily withdraw one’s projections from other people, to stop searching for the “divine world” in one’s spouse, and instead to find one’s own inner life as a psychological and religious act. It means to take responsibility for discovering one’s own totality, one’s own unconscious possibilities. It means to questions one’s old patterns—to be willing to change. All of this involves conflict, self-questioning, uncovering duplicities one would rather not face. It is painful and difficult.
But this suffering leads us to our totality. It elevates romance into a path to the divine world. We discover that we don’t have to die physically to find that world, but we do have to die symbolically: Our suffering is our symbolic death.
The wonder that is finally revealed is that we can live in the divine world even while we live in the flesh, here on this earth. For deep within each of us rises a “castle of white marble; at each of its thousand windows burns a lighted candle; at each a minstrel plays and sings a melody without end.” To find that wondrous palace we must look neither to another person nor to the other side of the grave, but within ourselves.
If we live this death correctly—as paradoxical as this sounds—it becomes a journey of discovery leading toward a new life. Death is revealed as the other face of life. And the “death” that awaits at the very center of romance is not the destruction of life but the flowering of an inner world.