More Auden

Some more quotations from the same Auden essay (the whole thing is wonderful): He is, like CS Lewis in Allegory of Love , comparing Greek conceptions of love with medieval and modern romantic coceptions, but adds a dash of de Rougemont:

The Tristan-Isolde myth is unGreek because no Greek could conceive of attributing absolute value to another individual, he could only think in comparative terms, this one is more beautiful than that one, this one has done greater deeds than that one, etc. The Don Juan myth is unGreek, as Kierkegaard has pointed out, not because he sleeps with a number of women, but because he keeps a list of them. A Greek could understand seducing a girl because one found her attractive and then deserting her because one met a more attractive girl and forgot the first one; but he could not have understood doing so for an arithmetical reason, because he had resolved to be the first lover of every woman in the world, and she happened to be the next intege in this infinite series. Tristan and Isolde are tormented because they are compelled to count up to two when they long to be able only to count up to one; Don Juan is in torment because, however great the number of his seductions, it still remains a finite number and he cannot rest until he has counted up to infinity.

Auden goes on to comment that for both Don Juan and Tristan/Isolde, time is the great enemy:

Tristan and Isolde dread [time] because it threatens change, and they wish the moment of intense feeling to remain unchanged forever . . . . Don Juan dreads it because it threatens repetition and he wishes each moment to be absolutely novel.

Of ancient Greeks, Auden claims, Plato comes closest to the later romantic conception of love (presumably in the Symposium ). But Plato’s view of love differs from medieval conceptions because “it is assumed that this kind of love [love that ennobles and turns someone into a hero] is only possible in a homosexual relation.” The ultimate goal of this love, for Plato, is not devotion to the individual beloved, but devotion to the “impersonal as universal good.” One moves to that kind of love by first loving an individual, and then moving stepwise to higher forms of love. Auden insightfully points out that this kind of elevating love is necessarily homosexual, or at least homosexual love fits best with this aspiration: heterosexual love, he points out,

leads beyond itself, not to the universal, but to more individuals, namely the love of and responsibility for a family, whereas, in the homosexual case, since the relation of itself leads nowhere, the love which it has aroused is free to develop in any direction the lovers choose, and that direction should be towards wisdom which, once acquired, will enable them to teach human beings procreated in the normal way how to become a good society. For love is to be judged by its social and political value. Marriage provides the raw material, the masculine eros the desire and knowledge to mold that material into its proper form.

This is interesting not only for its insight into contemporary homosexual culture, but also for the possible insight it gives into Auden’s own ambiguous (or not so) sexuality.

The essay is available online .