Otto Weininger was the first to give us a psychology of the cult of the Madonna, and he did it in a manner which proved his entire comprehension of this peculiar sentimental disposition. He realised and pointed out the contrast between sexuality and eroticism (his terms for sexual impulse and love), but in accordance with his extreme mental disposition he left these two principles in irreconcilable conflict, while I regard their antithesis merely in the light of a transient phase which will be followed by a reconciling synthesis. Weininger is, I believe, in conflict with spiritual reality when (guided by ethical, not psychological considerations) he proposes the theory that a man endows the beloved woman with all the lofty values he desires for himself. "He projects his ideal of an absolutely perfect being on another human being, and this and nothing else is the meaning of his love." "To bestow all the qualities one would like to possess, but never can quite possess, on another individual, to make it the representative of all values, that is to love." It is a commonplace experience that genuine love will awaken in the soul new and transcendent emotions, compared to which all previous experience appears petty and insignificant. The waves of this emotion are able to carry the lover to the infinite, or at least his emotion will help him to divine the infinite. He sees, unexpectedly, his inmost soul revealed to him, he has exceeded the limits upon which he has hitherto looked as a matter of course; the barrier between him and the universe has fallen, the whole world belongs to him; the egoist becomes less selfish, the cruel man gentle, the dullard clairvoyant; every man feels that he has become greater and more human. This is neither illusion nor projection, nor is it a subtle, psychical deception—it is sober reality. Weininger's suspicion of a delusion is nothing but the result of his ascetic solipsism, refusing to accept another being's help in his striving for perfection, a consequence of the one-sided, sterile cult of his individual soul, a noble but puerile pride refusing to be indebted to the world and to his fellow-men, the fanatical, metaphysical dualism which is so often met with in the second stage of eroticism, and to which stage he belongs.
Weininger shrank from the idea that an individual might be made the means to an end, instead of being an end in itself. In my opinion his justification for the translation of this formula—framed by Kant for pure ethics—to empirical psychology, is doubtful. To use an individual only as a means to an end which is alien to his inmost being, is certainly immoral. But all social life is based on a mutual relationship of means and ends; a man is an end in himself at the same time that he is a means to other individuals and the community. The teacher is a means as far as his pupils are concerned; the poet is a means in respect to all who seek in his writings information or recreation. To carry the stigmatisation of these facts to a logical conclusion, one would have to call it immoral to accept anything from parents or teachers; one would have to reject every good influence—which always comes from outside—and become completely absorbed in the cult of one's own soul. One would even have to object to being born, and would have to create one's self out of nothing. It has always been regarded as the splendid privilege of great men to exert an ennobling influence on others—why, therefore, should the influence of a beloved woman on her lover be objectionable?
Weininger's error in the sphere of eroticism arises from the fact of his imprisoning love in a formula which is by no means applicable to it. In love the mutual relationship of means and ends does not exist, the lover feels that the beloved is always an end in herself in the highest sense; he would find it impossible inwardly to establish such a relationship between himself and her; very frequently himself, his well-being and his life, are of no account to him if he can serve her. Weininger's assertion that at the consummation of love every woman is merely the means of gratifying a man's passion, is simply not true. On the contrary, it is a characteristic of genuine love that the physical embrace is of no great importance, does not even rise to full consciousness. The personality of the beloved is everything, physical sensation nothing. Weininger identifies love with passion and his argument is easily refutable by the experience of many. In love there is neither means nor end; if, however, categoric formulas must be used, one might speak of a reciprocal action. Equally erroneous is his corresponding assertion that the artist loves a woman spiritually, that is, in the sense of deifying her, for the purpose of drawing from her inspiration for his work. If he loves her, then his love is the alpha and omega of his striving, and if love inspires him to achieve a masterpiece, the effect of love on him must be considered great and good, because it is a creative effect.
The extreme individualistic ideal would lead to an absolutely unproductive view of life. Asceticism stands condemned because it is unproductive. I may regard an Indian fakir who has become so godlike that he can sustain life on six grains of rice a day, and draw breath once every quarter of an hour—to say nothing of speech or cleanliness—as a very strange individual; but I see nothing positive or important in him. The road which leads from the individual to the universal cannot be the rejection of the world; it must be its perfection, resulting from productivity of mind, or soul, or deed. He who on principle refuses to be productive, condemns himself to annihilation in the higher sense. I admit that he who works at his own perfection does good work, too; but it is the inexplicable secret of all truly creative labour—in the highest as well as in the lowest sense—that it must ultimately affect the world and eternity. The strongest emotions, the inner illumination of the mystic and the love of the great erotic, have been conceived in the heart of hearts; and have ultimately grown beyond their creator, from the individual to the universal. The more intimate and powerful the creative impulse has been, the more retarded and abundant may, perhaps, be the effect. But the chain which links the great soul to humanity cannot be broken, the work will make itself manifest—the work of deed, the work of the mind, the work of love—I do not say to "the public," but to life, to the world. The creative personality alone is the father of the objective values of civilisation.
The great love which led Dante, Goethe and Wagner to the summits of humanity is in the highest sense positive and creative. And he who realises that love is not subject to sexual impulse, who knows it as something purely personal, foreign and even hostile to the genus, must admit that it is one of the very highest of values. A contrary ethic is sterile, Indian, unproductive, not European. I am well aware that Weininger did not explicitly draw this conclusion; but he rejects spiritual love because it endows the lover with new capacities, the capacities of growth and perfection, and he is therefore in the last resort a representative of philosophic nihilism.
(c) Dante and Goethe
The worship of woman found its climax in Dante. Through the work of his youth, the Vita Nuova and his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, we can trace step by step the stages of the road, beginning with a glimpse of a young girl in Florence, and ending with the incorporation of a woman into the world-system. We are face to face with an extraordinary process of evolution. The young girl he had seen a few times, and who died in her youth, goes on growing and developing in his soul, until, at last, in him the will to raise woman above time into eternity, the will to make her a member of the divine system, reaches its full realisation. What had been begun by the troubadours and fully comprehended by the poets of the sweet new style, reached completion in Dante, and, was henceforth an eternal value for all humanity.
We see that the later troubadours were inclined to blend the lady of their heart with the universal Lady of Heaven; the need of deifying the loved woman was at the root of many dubious growths, and possibly these early poets were also to some extent influenced by their dread of the Inquisition (which never gained much importance in Italy). The new poets deepened this feeling, stripped it of all externalities, and appeared before the adored simply as lovers. They did not require the dogmatic support of the Church, their own feeling was sufficient guarantee. Dante, moreover, was possessed by a craving for an absolutely perfect and consistent world-system, and had, besides, the power to build it up and people it with sublime intelligences. And in this system, the crown and perfection of the mediaeval-Catholic conception of the universe, he assigned to the love of his youth a high and permanent place by the side of the deities. Dante thus raised his individual feeling to a universal dogma, and enriched the Catholic heaven by his personal love. What for two hundred years had been a dream and a desire, had become a matter of faith and truth. Now, and not until now, love and religion were one; the love of a woman had been included in the system of eternal verities, and had become identical with the love of immortality. "Love which moves the sun and all the stars" was acknowledged as a fundamental feeling. The anchoring of the subjective in the eternal was achieved in this metaphysical setting: the deification of the beloved; and no greater gift was ever vouchsafed to man than the creation of metaphysically true beings and values. All that had been done before had merely prepared the ground for this great deed: the enshrinement of the beloved in the heart of the divine secrets.
The Vita Nuova, which is at once a glorified historical record and the greatest testimony of metaphysical love, emphasises from the outset the inspiring, purifying influence emanating from the beloved; Beatrice is "the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtue." "When I saw her coming towards me and could hope for her salutation, the world held no enemy for me, yea, I was filled with the fire of brotherly love to such an extent, that I was ready to forgive anybody who had ever offended me. And whoever had begged me for a gift, I should have replied: Love! and my face would have been full of humility." Even before his love had been translated to the world beyond, he portrayed spiritual love as hardly any other poet before or after him. The women of Florence ask Dante: "Why doest thou love this lady, seeing that thou canst not even bear her presence? Tell us, for the end of such love must be incomprehensible to men." And he replies: "Ladies, the end and aim of my love is but the salutation of that lady; therein I find that beatitude which is the goal of my desire. And now that it has pleased her to deny me her salutation, my whole happiness is contained in that which can never perish." And the women: "Tell us, then, wherein lies such happiness?" "In the words that praise my lady" (that is to say in the emotion which is an end in itself and in its artistic expression). The lover never exchanged a word with her; had he done so, attempting to establish a reciprocal relationship, Beatrice, bereft of his idealising love, would have had to descend from her pedestal and show herself a girl like all the rest. Not until after her deification has become an established fact, does Beatrice (in the beginning of the Divine Comedy) remember her lover and come to save him. In one of his poems Dante says that not every woman could inspire such a love, but only a woman of peculiar nobility of character. It is very apparent that Dante, at first, was not sure of himself, and that he only gradually discovered the new consciousness which was stirring his soul; with every chapter the beloved recedes to a greater distance and becomes more sacred to him.
It is quite in keeping with all this that our knowledge of this girl of eighteen is very vague and uncertain. Some of Dante's commentators believe her to have been a figment of his brain, a woman who never lived, or an allegory of wisdom, virtue, the Church, theology, etc. But at the death of her father Beatrice again behaves like any other earthly maiden. There is a grain of truth in every one of these theories, for Dante was a great scholastic as well as a great poet, and in more advanced years he felt a need somehow to connect the love of his youth with the system of the Church; this could be done in an allegorical way without being inwardly untruthful.