Human History as History of Attitude to Love

Inna Shifanova

To Honoured Artist of Russia
Pavel K. Salnikov

The human history might be written as history of attitude to love. This history contains great wars, crimes, feats, heroes, mysteries and discoveries. I am sure that the human life after such discoveries is changing like after invention of a wheel or steam engine. Love makes a grandiose background for events of the multi centuries history which begun from Adam and Eve.

The first milestone in the history and the first evidence of love - is the biblical story of the King Solomon and Sulamite. His beloved one is hardly to be called a woman and personality, she is rather a child who disobeyed her family. The man understood in this story the beauty of sensuality living it through as a sacrament. The free but not a harem Love made it unique and gave the happiness to be beloved one who is "better than thousand others".

In the Middle Ages the human nature was declared as sinful. The church forced people to choose between love to other people and love to God. The earthly love is fighting against hypocrisy and as memories of this fight we have the tragedy of the XII century: passionate love of the famous philosopher Abelard and young gifted for sciences girl Eloise. They have been separated by hatred and envy of their relatives hidden as godliness and love to God. Abelard became abbot and Eloise abbess of a nunnery. After 26 years they begun their famous correspondence which is the historical evidence of love, where Eloise while admitting the power of God still chooses her everlasting love to her beloved one and like Socrates prefers to be accused by the society to be godless than to lie. She is not afraid to admit that her memories about the sensual love to Abelard are filling her thoughts even during the divine services. The connection of love, death and eternity is reflected in her words: "Sorrow about our death will be as great as our love was."

"What God had put together that should not be separated by people", - the Gospel (from Matthew 10-4-6) is saying, but in the heaven the matters of love but not of marriage are settled. In all times people have separated the lovers from God to bound them up with others for other merely human purposes. Abelard and Eloise, Romeo and Juliet were secretly but still married but anyway they fell out of the law. Lovers died, Love remained and owing to Love it was possible to live in the world.

After the humanity knew the wonderful fantasy about Romeo and Juliet its fortune was not hopeless anymore. Since that time all of us who are unhappy, not perfect and lost are awaiting Love somewhere in the future, which sees us as others - real. The world without their "sad story" would be predictable and dull.

Human beings are always trying to protect themselves using fences of stereotypes and conventions against unpredictability of life and love while calling it "common sense". "The common sense" is protecting against anxiety but somewhere behind its borders are Freedom and Happiness. The world is filling from century to century with more and more fuss like the earth is filling with waste. This world did not accept the union of the children who gave to it the dream of love, the marriage made in heaven, the world is only accepting the marriage based on the "common sense" and convenience. Perhaps the closeness of love and death lies in the conflict of the truth and scantiness of its rational perception. The death is winning in the 3-dimensional world, where the fuss is ruling with its fear, envy and hatred - love remains in eternity. This is the optimistic point of the sad story of Romeo and Juliet. Centuries are passing by but even Freud could not shake or depreciate the meaning of that fiction.

The story of Samson and Delilah, Petrarka and Laura, Orpheus and Euredika, Dante and Beatrice - those all are stages of the opening up the sensual space since the Antique epoch till the Renaissance, understanding of love when woman plays the role of a "object".

Did Beatrice exist? She did not. There was the eternal majestic blue sky, in the loving eyes of Dante the common face became a beautiful image. A bourgeois woman from Florentine became Beatrice.

A Middle Ages mythos about Dante repeats ancient Greek mythos about poet and singer Orpheus. The beloved wife of Orpheus Euredika died , but, he did not accept her death and decided to go down to the "land of shadows". "The land of shadows" is the place for Beatrice, Laura, Euredika, where they become real and personal. There is no sense for them to come back, because while they lived they just have been only shadows of their famous lovers.

Poets are glorifying Love and the humanity is glorifying poets, but women, whom they made famous remained still "objects" with swan-necks, sweet voices, beautiful bodies and other exterior and inner characteristics. Very often women do not have personality in the history. From all the "eternal questions" only one is important to them: "Does he love or not?".

Everything is changing in the story of Bulgakov - Master can not exist without Margarita and Margarita can not exist without Master.

The talent of Master is the main obstacle for love on the common everyday level. But the lovers do live in the other parallel world, their life is not just being. And they do have other priorities. Margarita called her lover Master, but she could just call him husband, to serve him and take care of him. But then they would not be Master and Margarita, they would not be themselves. She loved his book, she loved the thing which separated them and made him unprotected against life. "I love him as he is" more often means "I forgive his unlikeness". Margarita does not only forgive the unlikeness, she loves it as well as his talent. And this is just different level of love. She was Margarita, the hostess of the ball of master of dark, she was a witch not a victim. To value the talent and freedom - personal and of others - is natural to her like to die for sake of love. Again love and death are staying very close to each other, but the death of Master and Margarita contains the optimism of love which belongs to eternity. Their marriage, closed up in heavens should not be approved and confirmed on the earth.

It is a pity that we can not find in the history the traces of the man's love of the same kind. It is customary to be proud of the man's talent, the woman's talent is only to be forgiven. It is interesting to observe the "growing up" of the love "object" - woman - from the nearly child Sulamite to the grown up Margarita. Perhaps it is the way from the "love object" to the personality in love. Because the love is given to us not only to lose ourselves.

"Love is a deceitful land but only there we can be happy", - the song says. For this happiness, for this let's say esoteric experience we have to pay a very high price but this experience is worth paying it. And while destroying belief in Love we have to find in advance an replacement for paradise and hell in the soul, to explain the unknown power which can heal and cure and transform the reality, to find the source of inspiration. To take away love from the human beings - means to put it into the world of loneliness where everybody stays only for himself. The hatred to itself which became epidemic of the civilization is feeding on the cruelty and envy. From the same source wars appear, therefore thousands of fairy tales from different cultures tell us that love always overcome the evil and not only for itself but for all of the people.

Born by the imagination of Gogol old fashioned landlord and his wife - are the dream of the tortured by loneliness people about the safe niche of the patriarchal marriage, but characters like these are born not often as genius are. Perhaps this story continues the aphorism of Pushkin: "…there is no happiness, there is only piece and freedom". At the end of the life we start to understand that the happiness exists - there is no piece and freedom. Happiness is demanding a lot of energy, which is always in shortage, but this is fair, because there is no life where is no action. Happiness can not be as unclouded and constant like in the beautiful dream of Alexander Grin "They lived long and happy and died on one day".

Nothing kills the person in the way as the everyday routine does, which means translated into language of mythos "family happiness". "Happy" clients - are the majority of the clients of psychotherapists.

One should live the love if only of someone else's. Sometimes husband and wife wearing home clothes and slippers are watching fascinated the love story on the TV screen and their souls are hurting sweetly as if there is something imperceptible and strange what they are missing. We love watching love movies - a movie without love story is boring like life without love is as well. They will never separate they will never betray each other. One day two beautiful images will quietly die in their souls: the gentle prince and the beautiful lady. He will replace despairingly this image with the figure of an inaccessible women from his neighborhood. For Her as well the most important man will be the one who did not appear. In the old body the heart will ache and miss beatings, but all this is a mystery. What this mystery has to do with her household skills or with the size of his wallet? Does it have something to do with the good understandable but common everyday feelings which one day have put them together? It was also called love, but it was quite different kind of love, love in the three-dimensions-space, with its three-dimensions problems and dreams, which is serving to give birth to next generations. They are bound up with their roles much stronger than with each other as human beings.

Love, which we are dreaming our whole life long of, exists in the other metaphysic dimension and is above the strength of the ones who does not find it. To the other ones who did not fear to break into this Eternity, we are always ready to give wise advices, which might be useful only in our three-dimensional world.

We can rest on the fact, that we escaped the dangers of that Eternity, because there like in the macro world the common rules of the three-dimensional space do not work. The ones who risked, can not be helped, because every time it happens in the different way. Who is happier - I do not know. To each his own.

Love is destroying by people through the ages like talent, and is like talent strong and everlasting. It leaves giving us the right to be mistaken and falling into oblivion and while leaving it lasts forever. The History of knowledge of ourselves through the love - is the history of humanizing of Homo Sapiens.