And the young man does not have many moments to give away. He knows that any moment he gives away is a bliss he is giving away—this is bound to be a perfect means to teach speed. But the good gift of resolution is also the highest gain, the wedding garment without which he is an unworthy—this is bound to be a good means to prevent his becoming so rash that in his haste he would rush away from the resolution.
Precisely because this is how it is with the resolution or the one making the resolution, the reflection becomes ideal, and one quickly takes a wonderful shortcut. And why should one not go by a shortcut when it is certain that it takes one faster to the goal, faster than any other, but also unerringly, more unerringly than any other? It has been correctly observed that reflection cannot be exhausted, that it is infinite. Quite right—it can be exhausted in reflection no more than someone, be he ever so hungry, can eat his own stomach, and thus one dares to look upon anyone who says he has done this, be he a systematic hero or a newsboy, as a Münchhausen. On the other hand, reflection is discharged into faith, which is precisely the anticipation of the ideal infinity as resolution. Thus through the purely ideally exhausted reflection the resolution has gained a new immediacy that corresponds exactly to the immediacy of falling in love. The resolution is a religious view of life constructed upon ethical presuppositions, a view of life that is supposed to pave the way, so to speak, for falling in love and to secure it against any external and internal danger. See, in infatuation the lovers are, as it were, carried away paradisiacally out of actuality to some place like remote Asia, on the shores of a quiet lake, or in a primeval forest where silence reigns and where there is no trace of human beings, but the resolution knows how to find the road to the society of human beings and to pave the safe way, whereas falling in love does not look for such things but is happy as a child who lets his parents take care of all inconveniences. The resolution is not the man’s power, the man’s courage, and the man’s ingenuity (these are only immediate categories that do not correspond uniformly to the immediacy of falling in love, since they belong to the same sphere and are not a new immediacy), but it is a religious point of departure. If it is not this, the person making the resolution has only been finitized in his reflection; he has not taken the shortcut with the speed of falling in love but has remained en route, and such a resolution is too [VI 155] shabby for love not to disregard it and rely upon itself rather than to entrust itself to the guidance of such a smatterer.
The immediacy of falling in love recognizes but one immediacy that is ebenbürtig [of equal standing], and that is a religious immediacy; falling in love is too virginal to recognize any confidant other than God. But the religious is a new immediacy,120 has reflection in between—otherwise paganism would actually be religious and Christianity not. That the religious is a new immediacy every person easily understands who is satisfied with following the honest path of ordinary common sense. And although I imagine I have but few readers, I confess nevertheless that I do imagine my readers to be among these, since I am far from wanting to instruct the admired ones who make systematic discoveries à la Niels Klim,121 who have left their good skin [Skind] in order to put on the “real appearance [virkelige Skin].”122
To penetrate reflection successfully in this way until one gains the resolution is not so difficult, especially if one has the impetus of the passion of falling in love, and without passion one never arrives at any resolution but, most likely, in chats along the way with every Tom, Dick, and Harry, with thinkers and trinket salesmen, learns a lot about the world and gets much to talk about, just like the man who inadvertently, by remaining on board ship too long, traveled around the world; or, to express myself less facetiously: the person who does not have passion never sees the promised land but perishes in the desert.
What the resolution wants now is first of all to hold fast to love. In this new immediacy, which reaches far beyond any reflection, the lover is rescued from becoming a connoisseur; he himself is bowed down under the imperative of duty and raised again in the optative of the resolution. With respect to falling in love, he is directed toward essential matters and repudiates the reflection game of criticizing.
The resolution wants next to triumph over all danger and spiritual trials. Precisely because the reflection that precedes the resolution is altogether ideal, a single imagined danger will be enough to bring the one making the resolution to resolve religiously. Let him think what he will, even if the danger is only that he cannot take the future in advance by thinking. In using his powers of thought and his concerned love to think this, he eo ipso [precisely thereby] thinks it [the danger] to be [VI 156] so terrible that he cannot surmount it by himself. He has run aground; he must either let go of love—or believe in God. In this way the wonder of falling in love is taken up into the wonder of faith; the wonder of falling in love is taken up into a purely religious wonder; the absurdity of falling in love is taken up into a divine understanding with the absurdity of religiousness. Cheer up! A simple, decent person who respects ordinary common sense can well understand that the absurd exists and that it cannot be understood; fortunately this is hidden from systematic thinkers.
Finally, in the resolution he will, through the universal, place himself in relationship with God. He does not dare cling to himself as a singular individual if he is going to venture out with his love. His comfort is precisely that he is just like other human beings and in this common humanity is in relationship with God by faith and by the resolution. This is the resolution’s bath of purification, which is just as beautiful as the Greek’s bath before a banquet123 or as the bath Aladdin wished to have before the wedding.124 Everything that comes under the name of earthly vanity, selfishness, disagreeable manly intrepidity, the itch to be critical, etc., is consumed, and in the resolution the husband is worthy of the divine gift of falling in love.
If in his quest for the resolution the lover encounters anomalies, finds that he has become singular, not in the sense that this singularity promptly comes off in the washing of resolution, but singular in such a way that he does not dare to trust that he is a universal human being, in other words, if he encounters repentance, then it may last a long time, and if he is really in love, as is indeed assumed, then he can regard himself as someone selected to be examined by life, for when he is questioned by love up one side and by repentance down the other side about the same thing, his examination can become much too rigorous.
But I shall not pursue this here; difficulties of that sort have no place in a general consideration. The person making the resolution does not encounter such anomalies; he returns home from his expedition as the knight from the crusade, and so:
If he comes home with a feather in his hat
Hip, hip, hurrah! We’ll dance and drink to that!125
Thus that happy young man (that a young man in love is happy goes without saying) has found what he was looking [VI 157] for. Like the man in the Gospel story, he has purchased the field in which the pearl lay,126 but he is different from that man inasmuch as he in a way owned the field before he sold everything in order to buy it, for in the field of love he also found the pearl of resolution. He returns home from his holy pilgrimage; he belongs to her; he is prepared—prepared to meet her at the foot of the altar where the Church will proclaim him to be a lawful husband.
So now we have come to the wedding ceremony. Our young man has not become an old man—far from it—it does not take years to become mature in this way. Indeed, if he is not truly in love, and if he has no ethical needs and no religious presuppositions in his soul, he will never become mature anyhow. But the eternal does not need to intervene many times in order to find the really opportune moment, and in this he is matured. To be sure, this maturing makes him older in a certain sense, but it is precisely the youthfulness of the eternal that it gives to him, and in this way falling in love also makes a person older.
That a young lover is a pleasing sight need not be said, but it may be necessary to say that a husb
and is an even more refreshing sight, unless the altar is unto offense, because it is wrong, of course, to be only a young lover when one steps up there. But the husband is the young lover, totally so. His love is unchanged, except that it has something the youth does not have, the holy beauty of the resolution. Is he not just as rich and happy as the young man? Is my wealth less because I possess it in the only adequately secure way; is my claim upon life less because I have it on stamped paper; is my happiness less because God in heaven guarantees it, and not in jest, as Eros would do it, but in earnestness and truth, as truly as the resolution holds him fast! Or is the language the young lover knows how to use supposed to be more divine than the married man can understand? Is not the wedding ceremony itself such obscure discourse127 that it takes more than a poet to understand it; is it not such a boldly ventured promise that anyone who understands but half is bound to lose his senses? To talk about duty to a pair of lovers—and to understand it and still be in love, bound to the beloved with the strongest bond [VI 158] of immediacy! To talk about the curse that rests upon the human race, about the difficulties of marriage, about woman’s pain and man’s sour sweat—and still be in love and in the immediacy of being in love be convinced that nothing but happiness awaits them! To hear this, to envision the resolution, to keep one’s mind fixed upon it, and also to envision the myrtle wreath upon the beloved’s head—truly, a married man, a genuine husband, is himself a wonder! To be able to hear his beloved’s voice while the organ plays! To be able to hold on to the delight of erotic love while life concentrates the full force of earnestness upon him and his beloved!
But now to her, for without resolution there is no marriage. A feminine soul does not have and should not have reflection the way a man does. Therefore, this is not the way she is to come to the resolution. But swiftly as a bird she comes from esthetic immediacy to the religious, and one can say of a woman in quite another sense than of a man that it is a depraved woman whom falling in love does not make devout. They meet in the religious immediacy as a married couple. But the man reaches it through an ethical development. A Greek sage has said that daughters should be married when they are maidens in years but women in understanding.128 Very beautifully said, but one must remember that a woman in understanding is not a man in understanding. The highest understanding a woman has—and has it with honor and with beauty—is a religious immediacy.
It has often given me joy to consider how a girl and a young man must be counterparts in order to be a proper married couple. To be honest, anyone who does not have joy in considering this may have a sense for the most beautiful sight in the sphere of nature—a couple in love—but not the spirit’s sense and not faith in spirit. If someone declares that such a phenomenon, a marriage that expresses the idea, is indeed rarely seen, well, perhaps it is just as rare to see that a person who, as of course we all do, believes in immortality, in the existence [Tilværelse] of God, actually expresses the idea in his life.
In her immediacy, woman is essentially esthetic, but precisely because she is that essentially the transition to the religious is also close by. Feminine romanticism is in the next moment the religious. If it is not this, it is only sensual ardor and the demonic inspiration of sensuality; the holy purity of [VI 159] modesty is transformed into a darkness that tempts and incites.
Immediate love, then, is in the woman. Here is the common ground. But the transition to the religious occurs without reflection. That is, when an intimation of the thought, the content of which the man’s reflection ideally exhausts, passes through her consciousness, she faints, while her husband hurries off and, equally moved but also through reflection, is not overwhelmed; he stands firm, the beloved leaning on him until she opens her eyes again. In this swooning, she is transferred from the immediacy of erotic love into that of the religious, and here they meet again. Now she is prepared for the wedding, for without resolution there is no marriage.
Has something now been lost? Has the happiness of falling in love diminished because the bliss of erotic love reflects the blessing of heaven? Has the lovers’ wanting to belong to each other forever become a temporal stipulation because it has come to be in earnest? Is the highest earnestness as a resonance in the most lovable jest less beautiful than everything that love wants in immediacy, for the person who talks entirely in immediacy still talks only in jest. When the lover wants to risk his life for his love and she the beloved says Amen to it, even when he does risk his life, it is noble, it can move a stone to pity—woe to the one who laughs, but in a certain sense it is still only a jest, for the one who loses and ventures in immediacy has still not understood himself.
There is a picture that portrays Romeo and Juliet129—an eternal picture. Whether it is an exceptional work of art, I leave undecided, or whether the forms are beautiful, I do not judge—I lack both the aptitude and the competence for that. The eternal element in the picture is that it portrays a pair of lovers and portrays them in an essential expression. No commentary is necessary; one understands it at once, and on the other hand no commentary provides this repose in the beautiful situation of love. Juliet has sunk in admiration at her lover’s feet, but from this adoring position her devotion raises her up in a gaze filled with heavenly bliss, but Romeo stops this look and with a kiss all the longing of erotic love is set at rest forever, for the reflection of eternity surrounds the moment with a halo, and no more than Romeo and Juliet does anyone who looks at the picture think that there will be a next moment, even if it were only to repeat the sacred seal of the kiss. Do not ask the lovers, for they do not hear your voice, but out in the world ask in what century this happened, in what [VI 160] country, at what time of the day, at what hour it was—no one replies, for it is an eternal picture.
They are a loving couple, an eternal subject for art, but a married couple they are not. Am I not supposed to dare to mention a married couple; is the other supposed to be more glorious because there is lacking some of the invisible glory that marriage has? If that were the case, why, then, would I be a married man? In other words, no married couple is perfect any more than every pair of lovers is a Romeo and Juliet, but it is every loving couple’s beautiful joy to have this prototype; but here it is indeed a matter only of the prototype according to the supremacy, if I may say so, that determines the rank of the ministrants.
She is, then, not kneeling adoringly, for the difference that is fixed in the immediacy of erotic love, the man’s strength that gives him the advantage, is sensed to be raised into a higher unity, into the divine equality of the religious. She is only sinking down; she wants to kneel in the admiration of love, but his strong arm holds her upright. She is drooping, yet not before the visible but before the invisible, before the excessiveness of the impression; then she grasps him, who is already holding her supportively. He himself is moved as he grasps her, and if the kiss were not their mutual support, they both might falter. This is no picture, there is no repose in the artistic situation, for as one looks at her almost sinking in adoration, one sees beyond this interrupted posture the necessity of a new one, that she stands upright at his side. One has intimations of a new prototype, the authentic prototype of marriage, because married people are contiguous angles on the same base. What is it that produces that incompleteness in the first picture, what is being sought in this faltering—it is the equality of the resolution; it is the higher immediacy of the religious.
So forget all objections, which merely exclude themselves. Even when the objection declares with scorn: Habeat vivat cum illa [Let him have her, live with her],130 it just plays up to the married man, for this is what he wants, and the objection surely cannot want one to refrain from marrying, for then, of course, it would have nothing to mock and we would all become just as exclusive as the one making the objection. Hence marriage seems to me to be the most secure of all. Love says: Yours for eternity. The wedding ceremony says: You shall leave everything to belong to her;131 the objection says: Keep [VI 161] her. But then there is indeed no
objection; for even if the objection thinks that the married man becomes ludicrous, the married man is not thereby prevented from leaving everything (the mockery as well) in order to remain with her. Indeed, even if the mocker himself wanted to have her, if he stepped forward in connection with the objection that is called for—but that cannot happen, for it is only the licit that is sought after, and even if the licit “forever holds his peace,”132 there is never anyone who has sent for the illicit.
Since, however, as the occasion requires and as it behooves a married man, I have hastily shadowboxed with the objections, which usually are snatched out of thin air, I shall also look at the matter from another side.
I do not say, then, that marriage is the highest life; I know a life that is higher, but woe to the person who gratuitously wants to leap over it. It is in this narrow pass that I choose my checkpoint in order, if I may say so, to inspect in thought those who want to slip past. It is easy to see what direction that feigned outcome of life must take. It must take the direction of the religious, in the direction of spirit, in such a way that because of being spirit one wants to forget that one is also a human being and not pure spirit, as is God alone.
The Middle Ages’ disdainful view of marriage may conceivably return in a totally different form, as an intellectuality that renounces marriage not on dogmatic and hypermoral grounds, but rejects it out of recklessness of spirit. The extreme counterpart to this is already expressing itself, for precisely because inflated intellectuality has missed the ethical point, it can prate about the idolization of the flesh, but the idolization of the flesh is one manifestation that the flesh has become indifferent in relation to intellectuality. The opposite expression is that it is totally annulled, that spirituality does not want to recognize the corruptible body in which it lives, this temporality in which it has its home, its transient residence,133 this piecemealness134 out of which it must collect itself. There are various kinds of eccentricity; the theocentric kind has a reasonable claim to be assigned to the place to which it belongs. But speculation, after all, is theocentric, both the theocentric speculator and the theocentric theory. As long as it remains at that and the theocentric limits itself to [VI 162] being theocentric behind the lectern three times a week from 4:00 P.M. until 5:00 P.M. but otherwise is a citizen and a married man and a captain of the popinjay shooting club just like the rest of us, one cannot say that temporality has not been given a fair deal; a theoretical digression of that sort three times a week, a sidetracking, can be regarded as being without further consequences.
Stages on Life’s Way Page 20
