In the distant future even more spiritual possibilities will arise. Even love for demons will become viable and necessary. History has already seen some saints who grew to such a love. But to get ahead of oneself and cultivate in one's soul a love for the sworn enemies of God and of all living beings, when one is not yet free of temptation and when one's love does not yet embrace even the whole of humanity and the animal world, would jeopardize the ascending path of one's own soul. Demons are only waiting for someone to pity them. But they are not waiting because they need pity (they are consumed with pride and despise human pity), but because it is only one step from pity for demons to doubt in their evil ways, and a stone's throw away from such doubt to the temptation to reject God and rebel. To do so would consign the soul to harsh retribution and the generation of gavvakh, radiations of suffering, in just those quantities that demons dream about to replenish their energy. Love for demons is therefore extremely dangerous for everyone except souls already enlightened. Enlightened souls know how to love without feeling sympathy (for sympathy for someone is impossible without sympathy for their chief occupations, and demons are occupied only with doing evil) or concelebration (for only what is repellent to Providence gives demons cause to celebrate). That love can be expressed only by a feeling of deep pity, by faith in their ultimate enlightenment, and by a readiness to sacrifice everything but loyalty to God for the sake of that enlightenment.
But love for all living beings is, in practical terms, but one aspect of the problem. How are we to regard the other aspect of our life-both the inner and outer life-that involves everything called the love between man and woman?
The «burning coals» within every being, the implacable procreational instinct-wellspring of self-sacrifice, violent passions, purest aspiration, crimes, heroism, eve and suicides-Is it any wonder it was eros that was always the biggest stumbling block for ascetics and saints? People tried to distinguish duality within that love itself: physical love was contrasted with platonic love, infatuation with everlasting love, free relationships with the work and duty of childbearing, depravity with fairy-tale romance.
Sometimes they made a distinction between two transphysical wellsprings of love: Aphrodite Uranus and Aphrodite Pandernos. But in concrete situations, in real-life feelings, in day-to-day relationships everything became tangled, confused, blended, and knotted in a manner that was impossible to unravel. It began to seem better to pull up that love in oneself by the roots than to allow one's path to heaven to become overgrown with its lush vegetation.
Thus began the great ascetic era in religion. There is no need, I think, to reiterate what contortions of their own spirit Christianity and Buddhism had to resort to so as not to degenerate into ascetic sects that hated life and were in turn hated by it. Marriage was consecrated as a sacrament, childbearing was given their blessing, but celibacy continued to be regarded-with perfect consistency, one might add-as the higher state.
Love as a cause of various human tragedies revolves around the capacity for the feeling of love to be unilateral. It will be a long time, of course, before love loses that unilaterality-not until the second eon. But besides tragedies of that kind-tragedies of the first order, in a manner of speaking-humanity, in order to bring stability to an ever more complex life, laid the groundwork for yet other tragedies-those take place when the love between man and woman enters into conflict with established custom, societal values, or the law. When a man or woman loves but that love is not reciprocated, that is a tragedy of the first order, and there is nothing that can be done about it until humanity, as Dostoyevsky said, «is transformed physically.» But when two people love each other and yet are unable to come together in a harmonious and joyful union, in the full meaning of the word, because of the familial or societal position of one of them, that is a tragedy of the second order. Customs and the law should in time be reformed in such a way as to reduce tragedies of that kind to a minimum, if not to eliminate them altogether.
It is a task of immense complexity. It is even doubtful whether a universal set of laws could be drafted for all humanity in that regard. The level of social and cultural development, traditions, and the national psyche vary too widely among countries. It will most likely have to be the task of the national legislative branches of the Rose of the World, and not the central legislative organ. It is sufficiently clear, in addition, that society will have to be led, here as in everything else, through a series of gradual stages, because a unilateral decision in favor of freedom-that is, a swift repeal of all legal barriers-would lead, as Russia's experience after the revolution demonstrated, to moral anarchy and force the government to repeal the repeal and put the prohibitions back in force. That is because the government repealed the laws in an automatic fashion, without first inculcating an attitude toward love and marriage in the younger generations that would have helped them to avoid abusing such freedom.
It seems that there can only be one correct religious answer to the question of love between man and woman: such love is blessed, beautiful, and sacred to the extent that it is creative.
What is meant by that?
The most common type of creative love in our eon is the bearing and rearing of children, but that is far from the only form of creative love and loving creativity. Cooperation in any sphere of life, the cultivation of the best sides of each other's character, mutual self-improvement, mutual inspiration in artistic, religious, and other creative pursuits, or the simple joy of a young, fresh, passionate love that enriches, strengthens, and uplifts both partners-this is all divine co-creation, because it leads to their growth and enlightenment and to a rise in the level of the worldwide ocean of love and joy. The radiations from the exquisite love between a man and woman rise up to the very highest worlds those described in one of the preceding chapters as the Waves of Universal Femininity-and strengthen them. Even if the loving couple jointly pursues an erroneous path of creative work-if they both, for example, work at something with socially harmful consequences- even in that case only the orientation of the work merits condemnation; the impulse to co- create that marks their love, and the spirit of comradeship, companionship, and friendship that permeates it, are blessed from above.
Until humanity is transformed physically, the love between woman and man will remain harnessed, as it were, to the
reproductive 1nstmct. In time that will change - creative love will take on a different meaning. The concept of physical reproduction will altogether cease to be applicable to transformed humanity. The future will witness monads incarnated in enlightened bodies, a process altogether different from our birth. But under the conditions of our eon, of course, childbearing and rearing remains the primary form of creative love.
Here I think it is the right time to highlight some specific features of those historical tasks that the women of the era just beginning will face not only in childbearing but in life as a whole.