Love and Marriage

by Ellen Key

N’avez-vous pas votre âme?

are addressed to all who have been badly treated by life.

And whatever belief or unbelief a person may profess, it is in the last resort this consciousness of his own soul’s worth which saves him when no other help is to be found—and there is no other help.

In this sense it is doubtless true that the human being, woman as well as man, is an end in herself; that she has fulfilled her task if she has not suffered injury to her soul, even if she has gained nothing else from life; if she has increased the power of her soul, discovered her own individuality and realised it; for this alone is saving one’s soul. In this sense it is true that the “mission” of woman as of man cannot be the sexual mission, which does not depend upon our own will alone; nor, therefore, can he who has not fulfilled this be said to have lived in vain. In this sense also there is at bottom a certain agreement between the feeling of self-glorification just described and that of those who think that neither woman’s nor man’s highest destiny can be love, but only the life of an eternal being above all earthly and social considerations; that the highest reality of every human being is within himself, and that his highest happiness can be only to grow in holiness and godliness.

But for the shaping of life the difference is immeasurable. Here we are confronted once more by the dualist and monist views of life, the belief in the soul as supersensuous, and the belief in the soul as dwelling in the senses; the belief that the soul can attain its highest development and happiness independently of—instead of by means of—its earthly conditions.

According to the latter view man and woman are determined by their sexual life even in the greatest emotions of their soul. Sexual emotions pulsate in the age of puberty’s dreams of heroic deeds and martyrdom; they are the warm undercurrent in the religious needs which awaken at that time. Every woman who has afterwards performed a brilliant achievement of love, who has become a great Christian character—like St. Bridget of Sweden, like St. Catherine of Siena, or like St. Teresa—has had the fire of great love in her soul; her blood has been on fire with the longing to serve the race with body and soul. And therefore also her charity had warmth in it, while the victims of so much other benevolence freeze like shorn sheep.

A woman’s essential ego must be brought out by love before she can do anything great for others or for herself. She whose existence has been erotically blank seldom finds the way to what is human in a great sense, while, on the other hand, she to whom life has denied the opportunity of manifesting her erotic being in the usual sense, transforms it into an Eros that embraces all life, the Eros of whom Plato had the intuition when he made Diotima proclaim him: a touch of infinite delicacy; for may it not possibly be only woman who—since her whole nature is erotic—can thus satisfy her love-longing from the whole of existence?

But this sense of oneness with the universe—which the theosophist, the mystic, the pantheist, and the evolutionist express each in his own way, but which they all feel alike—is, above all, the gift of a great happiness in love. It is this way of loving of which it is especially true to say, that only he who loves knows God, the great word for unity in the all, in which we live and move and have our being. Not because God created mankind to increase and inhabit the earth, but because they were fruitful and filled the earth with beings and with work, did they give the Creator’s name to life and worshipped in the likeness of gods their own creative power, on account of which they also dreamed that they were eternal.

Because fruitfulness, the power of production in all its forms, is the divine part of man, it is impossible for anyone without it to attain “holiness and communion with God” in the meaning of the religion of life, or, in other words, full humanity. Even in its limited form, that of creating a family, it is the unerring means of extending the ego beyond its own limits, the simplest condition for humanisation. It can transform the egoist into a generous man, merely by giving him something to live for. For this reason love has taken the place of religion with innumerable people, because it has the same power of making them good and great, but a hundredfold greater power of making them happy. Therefore all great and beautiful resignation—flowing with sweetness and benevolence—is like a vineyard, made upon the slope of a crater.

But therefore also it is true of all who have quenched the warmth of fruitfulness in themselves, that they have committed the one unpardonable sin, that against the holy spirit of life. These women have received their condemnation in Lessing’s fable of Hera, who sent Iris to earth to seek out three virtuous, perfectly chaste maidens, unsoiled by any dreams of love. And Iris certainly found them, but did not bring them back to Olympus; for Hades had already made Hermes fetch them for the infernal regions—there to replace the superannuated Furies.