When one loves, the distinction between soul and body is passed. In
Love alone is the dream of Goethe, Heine, and the moderns realized:
here the reconciliation of the spirit and the senses is celebrated in
perfect innocence. For Love irradiates and makes fragrant the body in
which it dwells, and raises it aloft to sit by its brother the soul.
180
_Love and Innocence_
Life takes us back to its bosom when we love. The heavens, the
earth and the race of men no longer appear things external and
hostile, against which we must arm ourselves. We return from exile
in personality; our thought sweeps to the farthest horizons, and
plunges into the deepest gulfs of existence, at home in all places.
The "external" is no longer external: we contemplate it from the
inside, we gaze through its eyes. For the very principle of Life, of
which all living things are the expression, has been apprehended by
us. Our personality has been emancipated. This feeling of universal
comprehension is called Innocence.
181
_Love and the Fall_
Has the fable of the Fall still another interpretation for us? Was
the Fall of Man the fall from Love? When the feeling of universal
comprehension was lost, personality in the individualistic sense
arose. And Sin was the child of this Individualism. To the first man
bereft of Love, the earth assumed a terrible mien; nature glared at
him with a million baleful eyes: he became an outcast in his home.
No longer knowing the earth or other men, he experienced terror,
hatred and despair. To protect himself against existence, he created
Love's substitute, morality. And with morality arose sin, and perished
innocence.
182
_Love and its Object_
Nietzsche's psychology was wrong when he spoke of Love as a narrowly
egoistic thing isolating two people and making them indifferent to
every one else. There is too much of the philosopher and too little of
the psychologist in this observation. For mankind cannot be loved, Life
cannot be loved, until One has been loved. Only lovers can generate
such wealth of life that it overflows, enriching their friends, their
enemies, all the world. To love one is to love all.
183
_Freedom in Love_
In true love there is a feeling of entire freedom. Is it because the
lovers have by a divine chance found their true path, have become a
pulse in the very heart of Life? If Love is the principle of Life, then
in Love alone is perfect freedom. Ethics and instinct become one. This
is the road that leads beyond good and evil: Man must learn to love.
184
_Love and the Sensualists_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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