Reconciling Divine, Romantic Love with Physical, Earthly Love
I read this the other night in Robert Johnson’s We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Totally awesome book that seems to uproot a lot of the fundamental discord we had about romance and how Westerners incorporate romance into their lives.
(And, if it’s in here, I’ve obviously found it relevant to my own life.)
Some reference points:
- Iseult of the White Hands symbolizes an earthly, physical opportunity for love.
- Iseult of the Fair symbolizes a divine, spiritual, passionate love that is unattainable through someone else.
- Anima and Animus
When Tristan refuses Iseult of the White Hands he shows us the standard attitude of Western men. A Western man unconsciously believes that it is right for him to use his marriage to try to connect with his anima, to use a woman to carry his projected soul-image, and that he need not ever take a woman seriously in her own right, as a physical, individual being with her own complex structure and consciousness. A man believes that he must always search for Iseult the Fair (a fantasy/passionate femininity) and always reject Iseult of the White Hands (an earthly/physical femininity); he must always seek the divine world that he projects on a woman but never relate to that woman as an individual person.
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In Tristan’s vow, and in his refusal of his marriage, we find the basic flaw in romanticism: its partialness. It attempts to balance the one-sidedness of our Western psyche by restoring the experience of the gods, the inner world, the mysteries, and the divine love. But, like all collective attempts at balancing, it has become one-sided in the opposite direction. It embraces the opposite polarity, it idealizes the divine and ecstatic world but leaves no room for ordinary humanness. Ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations, and its focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.
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This is exactly what the myth was predicting for our culture, and this is exactly what we see as the normal pattern. People make the marriage in form but refuse it in fact. They refuse to make a real commitment to a human being, because they will only commit themselves to their inner vision, their inner ideal, their search for the perfect manifestation of the anima (in short, a man’s femininity) or animus (in short, a woman’s masculinity), their search for the divine love. Since they have not learned that this is an inner task, they imagine that they must always keep their options open, they must always reserve the right to follow wherever the inner ideal is projected. In our romantic fog, we think this is very noble, very “liberated,” but in fact it is just a misunderstanding of reality. It is our way of obliterating the human side of the equation, our way of refusing to be committed to Iseult of the White Hands.
The tragedy is that Tristan, in full possession of a life of relatedness, surrounded with human warmth, refuses to enjoy it or appropriate it. Curiously, there is nothing he need do: He only needs to open his eyes, wake up to the riches that surround him, and live. But that fog of romantic idealism, that denigration of the human world, cuts him off from the very love for which he starves. He rejects Iseult of the White Hands: He renews his pact with death.
This pattern in romantic love replays itself constantly in the lives of modern people. A man in a relationship or marriage feels vaguely dissatisfied: Life doesn’t have enough meaning, or he misses the ecstasy and the “rush” that he used to feel. Instead of realizing that he is longing for the divine love, for the inner experience of anima that is his own responsibility, he finds fault with woman. She is not making him happy; she is not good enough; she does not fulfill his dreams. Although she gives him everything that a mortal woman could provide, he rejects her and goes looking for Iseult the Fair. He always assumes that somewhere, in some woman or in some adventure, he is going to find Iseult the Fair and be able to possess her physically and find there his meaning and fulfillment. Thus we denigrate human love; thus we reject Iseult of the White Hands; thus we renew our collective vow to “serve a single love.”
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The cult of romance teaches us that ordinary people are not enough, that we must seek a god or goddess, a Hollywood star, a dream-woman or dream-man, a beauty queen: an embodied anima or animus. So long as a man is caught in this mentality, he will never accept anything except his anima; he relates to a woman only if she reflects his dream of Iseult the Fair.
The tale of Iseult of the White Hands is the tale of Tristan’s lost opportunity. Tristan misses his chance to discover that there are two loves and two relationships: one with anima within and one with woman in the physical world. Each is distinct, and each has its own validity. But, if Tristan, like us, had a second chance, he could learn from Iseult of the White Hands rather than reject her. He could learn that the meaning of life is not found only in seeking his inner ideal; it is also found in the physical woman with whom him he lives in the castle of Carhaix.
