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BOOK TWO: Revelation or the Ever Renewed Birth of the Soul
- University of Wisconsin Press
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169 BOOK TWO REVELATION OR THE EVER RENEWED BIRTH OF THE SOUL L OVE is as strong as death. As strong as death? Against whom is it that death shows its strength? Against the one whom it seizes. And love—certainly, it seizes both, the lover as well as the beloved. But the beloved differently from the lover. It is in the lover that it originates. The beloved is seized; her love is already a response to the beingseized , it is Anteros the younger brother of Eros. It is true first for the beloved that love is as strong as death. Moreover, nature has given only the woman, and not the man, the capacity to die of love. What has been said of the twofold encounter of the man with his Self applies strictly and universally only to the masculine. Thanatos can approach her, too, in the sweet name of Eros, and most often the most feminine woman. Therefore, because of the absence of this opposition, her life is simpler than that of the man. Her heart has already become firm in the tremors of love; it no longer needs the tremor of death. A young woman can reach her maturity for eternity, whereas a man can reach it only when Thanatos crosses his threshold. No man dies the death of Alcestes.1 Once touched by love, a woman is what a man will only be at the centenary age of Faust: ready for the final encounter as strong as death. Like all human love, this is only a simile. As keystone of Creation, death imprints everything created with the indelible stamp of its condition of creature, with the words “has been.” But love declares war on it. Love knows only the present, it lives only out of the present, aspires only to the present. The keystone of the dark vault of Creation becomes the foundation stone of the bright house of Revelation. For the soul, Revelation is the lived experience of a present that, though resting on the existence of the past, does not dwell in it; on the contrary, this present walks in the light of the divine countenance. 1 Reference to Alcestes by Euripides (438 BCE). Alcestes, ready to sacrifice herself for her husband, is saved by Hercules. PART TWO: BOOK TWO 170 IT is to God the Living One that the pagans cry, insofar as he is not sleeping, or has gone up hill and down dale; in the powerful wisdom of his creative act, he appeared as the God of life. That limitless power, hidden in the mythical vitality of God, came forth again, but it changed from arbitrariness, a prisoner of the moment, into a wisdom resting by nature on duration. What had struggled forth out of God’s “nothing” as a self-negation of this nothing, had entered into the living “something” of God and emerged from this no longer as a self-negation, but as affirmation of the world. As it were, God’s vitality once again became the nothing, a nothing of a higher degree, a moment which only had been related to that which escaped from it, but in itself, this was a nothing full of character, not a nothing exactly, but a something . This vitality was a nothing only in the fact that, when it appeared on the outside, it broke apart into new figures: one of these is already familiar to us, the essential power; for these new figures do not have behind them anything nameable, or anything from which they might have emerged; if we wanted to designate as God’s vitality as this sort of backdrop of the power to create which has been revealed, then we would rightly have to object that such an emergence could not occur out of the mythical vitality of the hidden God, but only out of its reversal in Revelation , but for this reversal there is no name; it is only the geometric point as it were out of which the emergence occurs. Of course, “before” this reversal, too, it was only a geometric point, the meeting of the two segments, that of the original Yes and the original No in the divine nothing; and the reversal is only comprehensible in the reversal of the directions: in one case, their rays meet, in the other, they diverge. But the result of the meeting of two lines is only a point; yet, as a conceived point, it can be named, determined...