Hamvas Béla - Heloise and Abélard ENG

8/3/2019 Hamvas Béla - Heloise and Abélard ENG

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/hamvas-bela-heloise-and-abelard-eng 1/5

Béla Hamvas: Heloïse and AbélardTranslated by Péter Simon. Summary based on excerpts by Norbert Hanny

Sections 1-4.

If something has been written immortally, its existence does not depend on human memory. Ithas triumphed somewhere else, eternally and infinitely. It did not want credit or fame, money

or power, it did not wish to teach or please. And what is in it takes place between man and

God. It has taken place. Even if no one knows.

Abélard and Heloïse took to each other. Their correspondence, in the form it survived from

the Middle Ages, is probably not authentic. The letters must have later been edited by

someone, who also added a lot to them and created unity in a material, which was probably

full of contradiction and confusion. His name got lost; only the hero and the heroine survived.

This is the case of anonymous immortality. There was no need for the memory of his personal

self to survive. He did his job, but not for man, whom he does not even tell his name. God

knows very well in his heart who he was. Among all humans, he was the only one tounderstand the woman, love and marriage.

Everybody has heard of Plato’s myth, according to which in times immemorial humans used

to have two faces, four arms and four legs, but they were so strong that the gods were afraid

of them, so they cut them into half. This is how the woman and the man were created. The

gods did not need to be afraid any more and humans did not think about ruling the world

because they spent their entire lives looking for their other half.

Swedenborg says that in the hereafter there are no separate male and female beings, but

marriages in which a man and a woman unite thus making one single spirit-being. According

to Welkisch, the present day disciple of Swedenborg, man and woman are twin-spirits

( Dualgeist ); very rarely the twins do meet on earth, but they have to wait for each other in the

hereafter and they can only enter divine existence together. Jung claims: in the unconscious of

every man there exists a woman, the Anima, the complementary part of the man; and in the

depths of the psyche of every woman there exists a man, the Animus, the complementary part

of the woman. These theories all grasp the instinctive feeling that the man is the half of the

woman and the woman is the half of the man, and that the two together only can be a whole,

full and complete.

Jakob Böhme claims that in paradise man was androgynous, similarly to God. When he fell

he split into two and the divine woman in him rose above to God: this divine virgin wasSophia. Sophia, by the way, had also been known by the gnostics, and even in old Egypt. Man

was given Eve, the flesh woman, as a substitute for Sophia. The divine virgin is the natural

half of man in paradise. But she does not live on earth. Man who fell into matter cannot live

together with Sophia, the pure spirit-virgin, but received Eve as a result of his sin. Eve is not

the true and perfect complement of man. Only a replacement for Sophia, a substitute, and a

bad one, who is not a soul-spirit, but only flesh and blood, nature and matter.

Sections 5-8.

There is no more perfect, more human, purer and truer sculpture than the Greek one. It is only

the Greek sculpture that makes it possible for me to stand face to face with the divine man.The only subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man.

1



Many of the antique Greek sculptures depict a female figure, girl or Aphrodite who already

stands naked with the sheet somewhere beside her, or is just undressing and something

implies that she is preparing to take a bath. The act of undressing is symbolic and religious;

taking off her clothes, not the cloth but the clothes that her real being wears, means taking off

nature. She takes off, or washes off herself everything that is not her. What this is about

always goes back to the original idea. The subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man.The subject of the female sculpture is the divine woman. And when she undresses, this

magical act is nothing else but the sculptor’s act of taking the human-material curtain off the

woman; he lifts it up and shows the divine woman. The Greek female sculpture depicts the

moment when the woman washes nature off herself in her mystic bath and the glorious and

divine Psyche appears.

The nuptials that the divine Psyche is preparing for has nothing to do with the man’s arms.

The meaning of the nuptial is something totally different. The bodiless, aerial Psyche has

taken off its clothes, the mystic liquid is there in the jar and it will wash off the hair, the flesh,

the muscles, it will dissolve its form and nothing palpable remains of it. The glittering Psyche

shines in and through the sculpture. The profane and base eye, which is the eye of the modernman, does not understand this divine light, which surpasses all ordinary beauty and shines

through these sculptures. What shines in these women is not the beauty of the material, form,

charm or proportion. Probably it has nothing to do with beauty.

The profane eye only sees a desirable woman. What is curious is that this woman is not at all

desirable. This woman is the woman. This woman is the Psyche, this Psyche is the woman.

This is the source of the woman. This is the origin. This is the opportunity to look into

immaterial radiance, the hereafter, the eternal and heavenly light, from which the woman was

born. This is the moment when one meets face to face with the divine origin of the woman.

We should not forget that the only subject of the Greek sculpture is the divine man, and the

Greek girl is the divine woman.

According to Greek mythology every year the queen of the gods, Hera, bathes back her

maidenhood in order to sacrifice it again and again to her husband Zeus. Goddess Hera knew

that if she washes nature off herself and becomes Psyche, she will again become the primeval

woman, the primeval virgin; she will become virginal like light, like the stars. She will return

to the source of womanhood, puts on herself the original form of the woman, her first being,

and returns regenerated and glorified.

Love is a gripping wish rooted in the metaphysical depths of humans, which everybody must

experience, and if they do not experience this, they will be left poorer than a blind beggar. Noone can find the explanation for love in nature; in nature there is only sex. For love to flare up

divine intervention is needed.

Sections 9-10.

The origin of love is surely different from that of sex. Love is the relationship between the

divine woman and the divine man. In love the meeting of the divine man and the divine

woman is not a whole, but more than that. It is as much more as God is more than nature.

Man and woman uniting in love are the mystical merging of two creative psyches. From sex

springs a new natural being, from love springs a new psyche. If two natural beings unite

without love, then it is merely the unification of two natural beings. This is the case of the

animal world – perhaps. But there is love, which is the meeting and merging of two psycheswithout sexual intercourse. This is the love, which breeds the immaterial psyche.

2



Man confuses love and sex. Often he regards something, which is merely sex as love, and

thinks that, without exception, all love must end in sex. And man thinks that beings are

created by sex. Beings are created by love, sex only adds the clothes, which are the burden

and which need to be taken off anyway. Only two psyches can create, and this is love, which

creates without sexual intercourse. When sex submerges and fades away, when the two

psyches are swooped by the other’s divine being, when even the thought of any touch or approach seems dreadful and disgraceful , when the other being lights a fire which strikes out

of nature like lightening – that is the moment of begetting in the psyche-love.

Do not think that this moment is rare. Everybody, unless they have lived a life of oblivion,

can remember ardent moments, alone in their room at night, or in the sun at noon in the forest,

on a mountaintop, at sea, or on a summer afternoon lying in a sweet-scented orchard, when

the divine woman was either at an unreachable distance or right there, it does not really

matter, they got so enraptured that something burst out from them, and the woman, even if

she was a hundred miles away, apprehended it and took it in.

Those who have not experienced this moment of psyche-begetting and do not know that thegirl is preparing for this act will understand nothing of the Greek sculpture of the divine girl.

She steps into a mystic bath in order to dissolve off herself everything that would disrupt this

nuptial of the psyche. More psyches are born from these invisible, supernatural acts than are

humans from sex.

The natural act of sex is totally independent of love. And when the first psyche, this First Soul

connected the divine psyche love with the sex of nature and with reproduction, this degraded

love and immersed it in sex. Creation and reproduction are two different things.

The confusion of love and sex is the unlawful unification of two processes, which belong intwo totally different worlds. It is curious that none of the three basic aspects of human

knowledge, the genius, ancient myth or mystic intuition, has paid any attention to this

most significant moment. Unlike to the consequences, which have been observed by many

more and much more often. Since this unlawful unification there has existed in the love of

both man and woman the fear of befouling each other. Christianity calls it the original sin, but

that is only a name. Everybody knows about it even if they have not heard the name.

In sex the meaning of the divine mystery of love grows dim and sex becomes the barrier to

the unification of the two totally different world creators. Love and sex, the way man lives it,

is a prohibited magical act which offers an opportunity for more and more creatures to use it

as a way of breaking into nature. From the magic act only First Souls can be born, whichmeans half elementary, half psyche beings. These are the creatures which ancient myth sees

as fish girls, man horses, boys with goats’ feet and girls with birds’ feathers. The typical male

character of the First Soul is the titan, and the corresponding female character is the siren.

Sections 11-12.

For the titan and the siren existence is a prey. They live in order to pillage joy in the world.

This joy is always sensual, natural, material and physical. The First Soul lives in order to

devour life, that is why it is sensual and like a predator.

3



The whole of Europe since the very beginning has known no other relationship between the

man and the woman other than that of the titan and the siren. All one has to do is watch when

a European man looks at a woman; when he has a look at her. This looking is already

touching. He seeks for pleasure. And the woman is virtually bathing in this look – and what

happens here is just the opposite of the mystical bath: she bathes on herself all that the

marble girl washes off.

Nothing has woman ever meant here but what is the symbol of sensual delight. She is for

robbing her off her charm then she can go to the cloister (Hamlet) or to prison (Faust). The

woman is a siren. And she has become one. She is unworthy of her own divine origin, she is

to her primeval beauty as parvenu to money; she considers it as capital which she lets for use;

she is the capitalist of beauty, the exploiter of her faculty. The divine woman has become

mere matter in her sacrilegious hands, and dips the most irrational miracle of the world in the

gutter, exchanges it for halfpennies and sells it at the fly infested marketplace. The siren is the

woman who betrays her own divine psyche to matter.

Marriage: to tie the titan and the siren together, who after a few weeks’ gross orgy findthemselves satiated and want to tear apart with all their strength. That is then what they call

disappointment. When the titan and the siren realise that they have robbed what they could,

they want to escape, they want new prey. They cannot satisfy each other. There is no

satisfaction in the world of the First Soul. There is only gross insensibility there. And then one

breaks out and staggers to another woman; then the other breaks out and comes at another

man. But, since they look for and demand the same, they get the same. They think that there is

a man or woman somewhere they will not be disappointed in, who will satisfy them and with

whom they will be happy. Of course, by happiness they mean the prolongation of sensual

delights into infinity. Some think they have made the wrong choice and missed the real one.

They try a new one. But they see, get and live the same, ‘cause they expect, demand and wish

for the same. It never occurs to them that it is not another man or woman they should want.

What could and should be wanted is different, that is quite different. It is not delight and

satisfaction. As long as they want this, after a while they necessarily experience the dreadful

experience of being two. Love is not pleasure and not happiness, it is not delight, fun or

sensuality. And marriage is even less so.

Sections 13-14.

According to the myth the first man lived together with Lilith. Lilith, the lover. The siren, the

woman of sensual delights, the mere sex-woman. But the first man got bored with her andsent her away. Then came Eve, the wife. This is the beginning of marriage. The basis of

marriage is totally different from that of sex. The basis of marriage is the psyche-love.

There are two beings needed for sex: the titan and the siren. Nothing else. That is enough. In

order for marriage to happen, besides the two beings it is also necessary to have the approval

of the Powers. Never and nowhere on earth has any people lived who did not know that for

marriage they needed divine approval and consecration. Sex is always unlawful. That is why

it hides under bushes, into woods, dark streets and filthy back rooms. Marriage is lawful. It

dwells clearly, it is publicly beautiful and proud. One can only become a husband or wife in

higher consecration. Not even love is enough. Not only because there is no pure love, but also

because love becomes pure as a result of the consent of the divine forces. Two psyches marryeach other. Now it is getting clearer what the mystic bath of the Greek girl means.

4



The point of marriage is that it has to be done in a higher world. Only in God can, may and

should two people meet, unite and live. Against which there is no better example than the

profane marriage of the modern man. Of course, we are not talking about the marriage of

convenience here. In marriages of convenience the fact that the marriage has taken place not

in the higher world but in matter appears unbashfully. But the marriage of sex is nothing else

but an extreme case of the marriage of convenience: this is just the same a meeting from below and the meeting only of the lower parts.

The condition of meeting and uniting exists only up above; above man. Marriage is not a

physical but a metaphysical relationship, just as the marble girl says when she washes off of

herself matter before her nuptials and prepares to step before the Powers so as to be initiated

into the mystery by the divine hand.

In marriage two processes of unification take place at the same time; only a man and a woman

make a whole. This act is called reintegration; it is the restitution of the unity of the ancient

human personality.

The other unification is infinitely more important and essential; this is not the meeting of the

two parts but the mystical merging and creative movement of the two psyche worlds by

divine touch. This marriage is not reintegration but divination. In this man and woman do not

reproduce but create, or in other words, take part in divine creation. The other sex is there so

that divination can take place. That is why there is the man for the woman, and the woman for

the man. The perfectly and completely different beings and worlds. They have to enter this

strange and different world, and they have to leave themselves there and submerge in the

other element. This is love. This forgetting about myself and melting into the other. Thecondition of complete self-surrender exists only in the other sex. I can keep myself in all of my

deeds and thoughts, in every incident of my life. But not in love: here I have to give myself upcompletely.

That is why beings that are tied to their Selves, titans and sirens, cannot love. I cannot give

myself up in a way that I get myself back. The one I get back is not the one I was. It is more,

richer, simpler, purer and more divine. That is the secret of love. I have to get lost and I haveto perish. And Barth says: perishing means not only a little, but completely. Without

cancellation, consideration, condition or caution. In the mystery only two beings that have

perfectly perished can partake in deification.

Section 15.

In the correspondence of Heloïse and Abélard the immortal anonymous author depicted the

moment when the love of the two beings, the male Abélard and the female Heloïse, takes sex

off itself, like the Greek girls take off nature, and they unite in the mystery of the psyche love.

This is the only fulfilled and happy love of the history of the world. Bold, unrealisable and

impossible, but this is the commanding and imperative and the only true love. What he says is

not an illustration, example, teaching or theory; similarly, it does not want money, fame, it

does not set laws nor asks to follow. That is how he discussed it with himself and God. And

that’s how it is.

* * * *

5

Documents

Hamvas Béla - Heloise and Abélard ENG