Modern Love and the Loss of Eros

Integration of the anima/animus in the age of transhumanism.

Tristan and Iseult

There are only four types of stores (outside of the necessary grocery stores, feed stores, and hardware stores) that I ever enter voluntarily: antique stores, musical instrument stores, gun stores, and used bookstores. If you want to look into my psyche, look no further than this admission.

On a recent out-of-town trip, I wanted to see if there were any used bookstores. It was small town, yet it did have a used bookstore—which was closed. As a consolation, I went into a New Age bookstore which was supposed to have some used books. My hopes were not high, though I did find a hardcover copy of Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson’s We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. I’ve know about this book for decades, and even sold a pile of them when I worked in a bookstore in my twenties, but never even considered reading it (I assumed it was pop psychology—a genre I abhor) until my friend, the art historian and fellow keeper-of-the-sophianic-flame Matthew Milliner recommended it to me about a year ago. We is part of a trilogy (She: Understanding Feminine Psychology and He: Understanding Masculine Psychology are the other volumes in the series). Sometime last year I read He (another find in a used bookstore), in which Johnson turns to the Grail cycle and Parsifal as his narrative and analytic scaffolding. In She, on the other hand, Johnson uses the story of Eros and Psyche to explore the feminine. Staying with the Arthurian torso, in We Johnson takes up the story of Tristan and Iseult as the archetypal ground zero of modern romantic love.

First of all, as an English professor by training, it gives me a supreme pleasure to see serious people take seriously literary works and the lessons they can teach us. And we’ve forgotten that the scholarly discipline of psychology is part of the humanities—and not of the sciences, as some would have us believe. Indeed, Johnson, like Jung and Freud (and so many others) before him, recognizes the wisdom in the great stories that have formed and informed what used to be called Western Civilization.

That Johnson wrote these books (based on lectures delivered some years before) over forty years ago is not lost on me. Especially four years after Covid, we inhabit a very different imaginal landscape, one extraordinarily impoverished and threadbare from that in which Johnson wrote. Ours is a cultural moment not unlike that of which Guillaume Apollinaire wrote in his great poem “Zone” prior to World War I: “C’était et je voudrais ne pas m’en souvenir c’était au déclin de la beauté”—“It was and I have no wish to recall it was during beauty’s decline.”

At the center of Johnson’s exploration of Tristan and Iseult is the proposition that Iseult, in one way, represents not an Irish princess tragically destined to become a Cornish queen, but the Eternal Feminine, the Divine Sophia, herself. It is She whom Tristan worships as She shines through the earthy vessel of Iseult. “It is this worship,” writes Johnson, “that we see in Tristan as soon as he drinks the [love-charmed] wine; we sense that it is not Iseult that he sees but something divine embodied in her, something universal or transcendent that she symbolizes for him.”

In Johnson’s read, the project is for Tristan—here an image of everyman—to learn how to integrate the anima. For those who might not know, the anima is what Jung described as the soul (depicted in feminine imagery) of a man, whereas the animus (a masculine image) figures the soul of a woman. Tristan—who has lost both his mother and father—anticipates the appearance of the anima in that he is a master not only of arms and hunting (with the double-meaning implied in the term venery), but also of the harp. (Being a lover of knives, double-barrel shotguns, and stringed instruments, I can completely identify.) As Johnson explains,

“The harp represents the power to develop a sense of values, to affirm what is good and true, to appreciate the beautiful; the harp enables a hero to put the sword in the service of a noble ideal. Our story shows us that it is the harp that enables us to journey on the sea of the unconscious.”

On this recent out-of-town trip, I had a great conversation with one of my oldest friends, a woman I met when I first started as a Waldorf teacher who my children think of as “Aunt Beth.” We talked, among other things, about the way we grew up in Detroit in the 1970s, long before the intervention of the internet. Our youth, we both admitted, was marked by adventure. I remember, for example, taking 20-mile bike rides with my buddies at the age of twelve—without a cell-phone! I also undertook many other adventures—some even legal—on what Dylan Thomas might have described as “the fields of praise.” Indeed, becoming a musician was part of this adventure: I started playing really sketchy dive bars when I was fifteen or so and ran into all kinds or weirdness and wildness before and after I signed a record deal when I was eighteen—all of it a combination of knightly quest and reimagination of The Hymn of the Pearl. Seriously, it’s a miracle I’m alive. And part of these adventures had to do with romantic love.

I always tell my own children and my students that I was a kind of dork when I was a youth when it came to girls. That is, I didn’t think a girl should just be expected to like me for who I was: I thought I had to earn her love. You know, slay a dragon or something, or at least write a poem. I don’t know where this chivalric notion came from, but it must be somewhere in the Martin DNA.

For certain, this desire for the deep feminine was intimately associated in my young psyche with religious devotion. (Despite being such a juvenile delinquent, I was very religious as a boy.) This psychic constellation is not lost on Johnson:

“In the symbolism of the love potion we are face to face suddenly with the greatest paradox and the deepest mystery in our modern western lives: What we seek constantly in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone; we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness. Here is the meaning of the magic, the sorcery, the supernatural in the love potion.”

Of course, the long traditions of Christian and Sufi mysticism attest to a deep eros that inhabits the love language of God. The Beguine mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg articulates this beautifully:

“Lord, love me passionately, love me often, and love me long. For the more passionately you love me, the purer I shall become. The more often you love me, the more beautiful I shall become. The longer you love me, the holier I shall become here on earth.”

And moving from the other direction, John Donne shows how human love can take on divine dimensions in his poem “The Extasie”:

Where, like a pillow on a bed
	A pregnant bank swell’d up to rest
The violet's reclining head,
	Sat we two, one another’s best.
Our hands were firmly cemented
	With a fast balm, which thence did spring;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
	Our eyes upon one double string;
So to’intergraft our hands, as yet
	Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
	Was all our propagation.

But here’s the thing: All of this is disappearing. Eros—both human and divine—is an endangered species.

Statistics show that young people are having far less sex, marrying later in life if at all, and are having fewer (if any) children whether or not they are married. This is a society in which pornography thrives. Indeed, some suspect that the reason young people are in such a predicament is precisely due to the interventions of the internet—including porn and gaming—that keep the young voluntarily confined to quarters, a phenomenon only exacerbated by the lockdowns that accompanied all things Covid. The result is increased incidence of depression, suicidal ideation, and despair.

I have to wonder if the decline of religious faith is a direct correlative of the decline in romance, let alone marriage. Pointing to the Troubadours and the traditions of courtly love, Johnson observes, “Romantic love began as a path of spiritual aspiration; unconsciously, we seek that same path in romantic love today.” Only, I’m not sure he would say so today today.

I also think the advent of hormonal birth-control has significantly contributed to the decline of eros in the West. I know this might sound counter-intuitive, but it’s not. As Mary Harrington convincingly argues in Feminism Against Progress, hormonal birth-control was, in fact, the first stage in the transhumanist agenda, as it was the first time a medical intervention was introduced not to heal a diseased or sickened biological organism but to stop its proper functioning. As a result, women became masculinized and men became feminized. Risk—an important feature in the adventure of becoming—was profoundly minimized. Indeed, imagine the porn industry without hormonal birth-control (or Viagra, for that matter). It wouldn’t exist, certainly not at the level we see it now. Now talk to me about liberation. (On second thought, talk to me about slavery.) Porn is the most unerotic thing in existence.

Another, very tragic, dimension to our cultural moment is in how the integration or the anima/animus is no longer undertaken in the adventure intrinsic to living a human life, but is taken up by medical and technocratic means. In a world in which most young people now confine themselves to quarters due to lockdown conditioning, no one should be surprised. Indeed, what is the trans movement but a pharmacological and technological transhumanist intervention that leads not to psychic and spiritual wholeness but to servitude to a lifetime of further medical interventions and a concomitant subscription service to hormone therapeutics? The anima will not be integrated in such a way; it will only become further alienated from the self. It’s a spiritual black hole, and Sophia will not be found there.

Some young people sense something is amiss, of course. In fact, the only demographic that seems to be embracing love, marriage, and fertility among the young appears to be with the religious, particularly in those attracted (note the metaphor) to traditional Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Those churches tend to have a lot of babies and young families. I don’t know how it will work out in the long run, but it is encouraging to see the embrace of life and risking it all for eros human and divine.

I think it all comes down to risk. Life is adventure, not a video game. Love embodies (literally) a risk. Faith is also a risk. So is friendship. And that’s because all of these things are as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. But with nothing ventured is nothing gained.

I also think we live in a greater culture that embraces sterility, that seeks to destroy not only marriage, but also fertility and the feminine. And because it seeks to destroy them, it seeks to destroy the masculine. And, for the most part, it’s succeeding.

So, to not end on an unhappy note, allow me to share a passage from the Song of Songs, one of the most beautiful love poems ever composed (and which was read in its entirety at my wedding by a man and woman in archetypal glory):

By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?
It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.