Is All Fair in Love and War?
‘Oh, Love! thou art the very god of evil’ – Lord Byron
The proverb, ‘all is fair in love and war’, is attributed to the English writer John Lyly (1553–1606), written in his didactic Romance novel, Euphues (from which the word ‘euphemism’ derives). The basic meaning of the proverb is that love, like war, falls outside the bounds of ordinary ethics. The original reads: ‘The rules of fair play do not apply in love and war’. Like all good epigrams, Lyly merely repeats what we already know in a novel form. As a cliché, it has now lost a lot of its original novelty — but none of its lasting truth.
The concept of love transcending morality is a lot older than Lyly’s proverb. In his book, The Symposium, Plato claims that, he who loves is the only person who can swear and be forsworn without incurring the wrath of the gods: ‘The strangest thing of all is that when a lover swears an oath and breaks it — at least this is what people say — he and he alone is forgiven by the gods, for an oath sworn in passion, they say, has no validity’ (Plato).
The implication here is that love is a divine madness, a temporary insanity, which Plato calls theia mania. ‘Falling in love automatically tends toward madness’ says José Gasset. Eros, the personification of love (also known as Cupid), does not discriminate. With his arrows, both gods and mortals are stripped of their autonomy:
Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life. Eros comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder. Eros employs nets, arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing gloves or bits and bridles in making his assault. No one can fight Eros off. Very few see him coming. He lights on you from somewhere outside yourself and, as soon as he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resist the change or control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for the worse, at best a mixed blessing (Carson)
Does love transcend ethics because of this ‘divine madness’? I am not convinced. I am not even convinced that the sort of madness that the lover exhibits is worth the word ‘mad’. As Roland Barthes rightly says:
Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never — I am entitled only to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness : love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible; besides, it is entirely recuperated by the culture: it frightens no one (Barthes)
We must assume then, that the supra-moral status of love has nothing to do with temporary insanity. It is, rather, a consequence of transcending the self. This is what the madman and the lover truly have in common; porous boundaries. The lover and their beloved identify as one. There is complete surrender and no regard for self-preservation. Returning to the Symposium, Plato says that love not only makes us do things even our enemies would not want to see us doing (‘begging, swearing oaths, willingly enduring the kind of slavery even a slave would not put up with’), but that it makes us courageous: ‘It is exactly as Homer describes a god ‘breathing might’ into some of the heroes: in just the same way Love provides from his own being this inspiration for those in love’ (Plato).
Love, in other words, allows us to transcend ourselves. In his book Eros and the Mysteries of Love, Julius Evola hints as this ‘ultimate goal’ of transcendence:
In the ethics of the Aryan people, no other virtue was honored so much as the truth and nothing inspired so much horror as a lie. In Indo-Aryan morals, a lie was allowed only for the purpose of saving a human life or in love […] The moral to be drawn is that because something absolute is to be expected from love, it preempts even virtue itself. Its ultimate goal is beyond good and evil (Evola)
Goethe’s Faust
In Goethe’s version of the Faust myth, there is the curious addition of the Gretchen story, which has puzzled readers for almost two centuries. The legend of Faust is well-known; it is the story of a ‘daring magus who sells himself to the Devil for new knowledge and new powers’. In Goethe’s version, which is perhaps now the most famous, half of part one is dedicated to Faust’s affair with a young girl named ‘Gretchen’ — a seemingly incongruous addition to the traditional story of Faust:
Goethe’s Gretchen story is not simply an episode in the career of a magician, a supernatural amorous encounter like the traditional chapbook episode made famous by Marlowe, in which Helen of Troy is procured as Faust’s succubus; and it goes far beyond the passing mention, in the 1674 chapbook, of a ‘very pretty but poor servant-girl’ whom the doctor loves but because of his satanic contract cannot marry. Rather, it is a compelling romantic love-story in which the whole emphasis shifts to the innocent female partner and her tragic fate. It takes over and dominates the entire Urfaust conception, displacing the specifically Faustian themes. We must look outside the Faust tradition for explanations of why the young Goethe’s Faust drama, and our attention, are suddenly sidetracked in this way (Luke)
Explanations range from a personal affair that preoccupied Goethe, to a contemporary and highly-publicized execution of one Susanna Margaretha Brandt (who shares a middle name with Gretchen). As in Goethe’s story, Brandt was a simple girl who claimed to have been seduced by a young traveller ‘on the promptings of the Devil’, and ‘killed her child to avoid public disgrace’.
Both explanations may be true, but the addition of this story in Faust’s collaboration with the Devil may simply be a nod to the supra-moral status of love. Faust’s passion for Gretchen is, after all, a ‘burning flame’ that intimates hell-fire:
This deep commotion
And turmoil in me, I would speak
Its name, find words for this emotion —
Through the whole world my soul and senses seek
The loftiest words for it: this flame
That burns me, it must have a name!
And so I say: eternal, endless, endless
‘Eternal, Endless’. This is the absolute that Evola evokes above. Is all fair in love and war? Sure. But that does not mean that there are not victims in either. After corrupting Gretchen, Faust is overcome with guilt (another curious addition to the character):
What are the joys of heaven in her embrace?
So close to her, her dear love warming me,
Yet still I feel her misery! Who am I? The unhoused, the fugitive,
The aimless, restless reprobate, Plunging like some wild waterfall from cliff to cliff
Down to the abyss, in greedy furious spate!
And as I passed — she, childlike, innocent,
A hut, a meadow on the mountain-slope,
A home like that, such sweet content,
Her little world, her little scope!
And I, whom God had cursed,
Rocks could not satisfy
My rage to rive and burst
And wreck as I rushed by!
I had to ruin her, to undermine
Her peace; she was our victim, hell’s and mine!
Help me, you devil, to cut short this waiting,
This fear! Let it be soon, if it must be!
May her fate crush me, my own fate out-fating,
And I be doomed with her, and she with me!
Even after this, he cannot help himself. As far as he is in love, he is damned: ‘Let it be soon, if it must be’.
As the Friar says in Romeo and Juliet, ‘these violent delights have violent ends’. All is fair in love and war.
