CHAPTER II AS THE PROPHET OF LOVE NOT only is the Poet the bearer of glad tidings of great Joy in general, but of the Joy of Love in particular. In spite of a just appreciation of the value of Christianity, as a stage in the development of the human mind, and of the special value of Christian Chivalry in the Middle Ages, in its production of a nobler ideal of the sexual relation of men and women,1 it seems to me, nevertheless, incontrovertible that Christian thought has always been more 1 I am not well acquainted with the history of Chivalry, but from my knowledge of the Old French Romances I am strongly inclined to think that the religious Sanction of the love element in Chivalry was more in the nature of a concession to human weakness than a Consecration of Sex. None but "virgin knights" could achieve the Holy Grail. or less at variance with poetic thought, on the subject of the universal instinct of Love. The difference may, perhaps, be stated thus: That while the Poets have always regarded Sex as sacred and Love as divine, the Churches have regarded them as carnal and profane in themselves, and apart from prescribed sanctification; or, in other words, while Poetry has eulogised Love, as a blessing and benefit to the world, Religion has disparaged it, as an obstacle to the spiritual life; or, again, in another form,—whereas Poetry has taught that the joy of Love ministers to the passion of the soul, Religion has maintained that the passion of the soul is destroyed by the joy of Love. "It was a favourite opinion among the Fathers,” says Westermarck, “that if Adam had preserved his obedience to his Creator he would have lived for ever in a state of virgin purity, and that some harmless mode of vegetation might have peopled Paradise with a race of innocent and immortal 1 The word intended is probably “germination.” 1 beings"; which opinion was afterwards echoed as a " melancholy utinam" by Sir Thomas Browne, who wished that men and women might "procreate like trees, without conjunction." 2 The sturdy sense and sane imagination of Milton, however, represented Adam and Eve as living, even before the Fall, in the bonds of connubial love.3 Nevertheless, the shame › of sex-the woman's fear of the man, and the man's fear of the woman-is common at the present day among persons of a religious temperament. In a word, the ancient doctrine of Manicheism is far from obsolete. Consciously or unconsciously, the great majority of Christians are actuated by it, or at least by part of it. If they do not definitely believe in the duality of God, they certainly believe in the duality of Man; so strangely do certain effete particles, that one would fancy must long ago have been shaken from the mind 1 The History of Human Marriage, pp. 154-155. 3 Paradise Lost, Bk. iv. Sec. (a). of Humanity, in his impetuous course down "the ringing grooves of change,” adhere still, and are borne into ages to which they do not belong. Mr. E. H. Coleridge, in his notes to Byron's Preface to Cain, says: "The Manicheans (the disciples of Mani or Manes, third century A.D.) held that there were two coeternal creators—a god of darkness who made the body and a god of light who was responsible for the soul-and that it was the aim and function of the good spirit to rescue the soul, the spiritual part of man, from the possession and grasp of the body, which had been created by and was in the possession of the spirit of evil. St. Augustine passed through a stage of Manicheism, and in after life exposed and refuted the heretical tenets which he had advocated, and with which he was familiar." 1 This explanation of the world was, however, far more ancient. "The old legends of dualism," says Professor Draper, "became known to the Jews during their Babylonian captivity." But the con1 The Works of Lord Byron, vol. v, p. 209, note 2. trary explanation was known also: "At the time of the Macedonian expedition, Persia recognised one universal intelligence, the creator, preserver and governor of all things, the most holy essence of all truth, the giver of all good." " 1 This was the monotheism of Zoroaster; who is perhaps represented in the Spanish Chapel at Florence, sitting at the feet of Astronomy and gazing up at the stars. "Spirit and matter," writes Mr. Pater, "have for the most part been opposed, with a false contrast or antagonism, by schoolmen whose artificial creations those abstractions really are. In our actual concrete experience, the two trains of phenomena, which the words matter and spirit do but roughly distinguish, play inextricably into each other. Practically the Church of the Middle Age, by its aesthetic worship, its sacramentalism, its real faith in the resurrection of the flesh, had set itself against that Manichean opposition of spirit and matter and its results in 1 Conflict of Religion and Science, p. 15. |