Femina corpus opes animam vim lumina vocem,
Polluit adnihilat necat eripit orbat acerbat.
[Woman defiles, annihilates, kills, snatches away, robs, and aggravates
body, riches, the soul, strength, the light of the eye, the voice.]
(quoted in Wayland Hilton Young, Eros Denied, 173)
Love is submergence in creatureliness, refusal of the summons from God. Man in love is overcome by the same selfishness that characterizes melancholia, according to medieval perception: man himself steps into God’s place, regarding himself as the basis and goal of existence. Since lovers did not accept the Christian division of the world, they had to be branded ideologically, and what could be more appropriate than melancholia: every feature of melancholia was demonstrable in love too; indeed, love was capable of inducing melancholia. The following simile, which stems from the quill of the medieval scholastic St. Bonaventure, is instructive and speaks volumes: “For just as putrid and melancholic humors, if they come to have preponderance, cause scabies, eruptions, and leprosy. . so impure thoughts, disordered tempers, and detrimental images of desire directed at women, if they overwhelm the heart, yield putrid fluids and disordered carnal desires” (quoted in Jehl, Melancholie und Acedia, 86). Lovesickness was first called melancholic during the period of Hellenism in the first century CE (by Aretaeus of Cappadocia), and thereby a tradition that has endured to the present day was born. According to Avicenna (eleventh century), love is an illness, a form of mental distress similar to melancholia; Arnaldus (thirteenth century) was of the opinion that love is a melancholic passion; Jason Pratensis (sixteenth century) classified erotic love among the diseases of the brain; Hercules de Saxonia (sixteenth century) reckoned that love-melancholy could be elicited equally by women and the excessive adoration of God; in Robert Burton’s weighty tome, love-melancholy is the subject of a single long chapter; in 1612, Jacques Ferrand published a book in Paris with the title Traité de l’essence et guérison de l’amour ou de la melancholie érotique.
The lover, like a medieval melancholic, struggles in a double bind: on the one hand, he disputes with every fiber of his being that his amorous desires are in any way sinful, yet on the other hand, love fills him with a guilty conscience, since, after all, he is not supposed to evade a universal commandment. For him, love is a wonderful state in which the longings of body and soul are indistinguishable, yet at the same time, it is a sin — a sign of turning away from God. The lover would like to unite with his beloved, but he is afraid: all that remains is the longing, which gradually appropriates love to itself. True love is nothing more than anguished desire that never attains its goal. “Nothing is more enjoyable than love from afar,” Jaufre Rudel wrote in the twelfth century; nothing is sweeter than love-to-death, said Wagner in the nineteenth century; and in the twentieth century, Thomas Mann wrote this in a notebook: “To long for love to the verge of dying for it, and yet nonetheless to despise everyone who loves. Happiness is not in being loved; it is satisfaction mixed with disgust for vanity. Happiness is loving and not making even the tiniest approach towards the object of one’s love” (Notizbücher 1–6, 210). Pining love, which is essentially engaged with Nothingness, is a legacy of Christianity; the Romantics, both conceptually and in their way of living, were the most consistent in making twins of love and death. (Since early in the nineteenth century, modern love has lived on as Romantic rather than melancholic in the consciousness of nonlovers.) We have seen how, starting with the Renaissance, the notion of melancholia has been reinterpreted — in the case of love-melancholia, this has not happened in the same conspicuous way: the yearning, unfulfilled love of the Middle Ages is still alive and kicking in the present day, with only a shift in emphasis: what used to be a sin has become the principal value in modern times.2
“Modern” love is the love of people left alone. It is a matter of pure chance with whom they fall in love, but in a deeper sense it is nevertheless inevitable. For a lover’s choice of his love object does not depend solely on his momentary frame of mind: the choice is influenced by forces that are linked to him, but also point beyond him. The past, personality, physique, mental constitution, sensitivity, temperament — all those play a part in deciding that out of a mass of people on a crowded beach one will pick out just one person, and no other, to be the object of one’s love. That decision is so definite that it is open to question (though it cannot be decided) whether one was in love in the first place and just needed to pick the subject of that love in retrospect. The choice is fateful, the meeting necessary. Of course, a lover will believe himself to be free in making his choice, and has a right to do so. Not in the Hegelian sense that freedom is the recognition of necessity, since that statement irretrievably incorporates the individual into a system of relationships and is true at most in the case of individuals of exceptional stature who genuinely do recognize the necessity but, having recognized it, treat it freely in accord with their own pleasure (Goethe). In the modern age, such a statement is downright cynicism. By making a choice, however, in spite of all the necessary and fatal constraints, lovers preserve their own freedom — the essence of love, after all, being irreplaceability, incomparability, and uniqueness. Therefore, lovers are chosen people, their bearing aristocratic, their position peerless. In the modern world, which strives for facelessness, love means a rupture: it can only assert itself against the world, and “introduction” into the world, the “taming” of the lover, that monster without any discretion, is in reality directed at the termination of love. “If one does not understand making love the absolute, in comparison with which all other topics are lost sight of,” says Kierkegaard, “one should never get involved with, enter into love, even if one gets married ten times” (The Concept of Dread, 376). Love “takes away one’s brains,” “love is being beside oneself”—so talks the world of a lover, but scorn is all it gets back in exchange for the sympathetic pat on the shoulder: the lover has no intention of “returning” to the world, since only he knows that the world’s primness and levelheadedness is all about the voluntary acceptance of limitations.