Hortus Conclusus

Marriage:

Where love has created a marriage, the unity of both parts of the marriage is so well founded and fenced in that only rarely can any disturbance of their mutual feelings come from outside…

And yet no marriage is so protected that temptation could not approach it!

But with the approach of temptation it will always be clear if a marriage is indeed rooted in genuine love or whether only inclination brought together man and woman, – an inclination which on both sides can easily be replaced by another inclination…

Where marriage is deeply rooted in genuine love, even the strongest temptation will be unable to harm it!

Even if temptation can only be defeated after a hard struggle, love will ultimately gain victory, for all the powers of temptation are incapable of offering continued resistance as soon as true love becomes aware of its power and overcomes with this power whatever menaces it! – –

Despite all this you should be vigilant and not just wait until temptation has got so strong that it can only be defeated after a hard struggle!

You can train yourself to such vigilance, just as you can also carelessly leave yourself exposed to temptation until it presses hard upon you and demands strong resistance. – –

Temptation can approach you everywhere, even when you are not looking for it, indeed, even when you most cautiously choose your paths in order to avoid it because it frightens you. –

Temptation, however, is not yet ‘guilt’!

Only when you begin to listen to it, – when you let it come too close to you, – only when you cherish it and play with it, – can you truly not consider yourself any longer to be free of guilt! – –

Even if ultimately you remain the victor, you have burdened yourself with serious guilt and will not be permitted to rest until all the consequences of this guilt vanish from your life! – – –

Perhaps you will have to admit to yourself that you were often far from vigilant where vigilance might have been expected of you? –

It would be pointless for you now to wallow in self-torment!

With all your self-reproaches you cannot undo what you have done, and you can only eradicate the traces of your fault from your life if you take care to prevent all its actual and possible consequences . – –

You must learn lessons from every single experience and so your stumble can teach you how through vigilance you can keep yourself free of guilt in future, even if you will not always be able to avoid temptation…

You must learn to control the slightest feeling; you must weigh it and at the same moment reject it when sensing that within it temptation lurks!

If you recognise the hostility at once when it approaches, it will always be easy to overcome it and never will you truly – in the ultimate sense of the word – ‘fall into temptation’! – – –

Only if you take delight in the first stirrings of temptation will temptation become guilt for you!

You can gain a great increase in strength from temptation if you remain constantly vigilant and try to recognise it in all its guises, so that you can refuse it  access into your inner being.

– Every single man has some ‘weakness’; temptation will always be able to trace down this weakness. –

But if you meet even its initial approaches with resistance, and with a ‘no’ which brooks no compromise, you will continue to gain strength, –particularly where you need strengthening! – –

Through your vigilance you will change yourself completely so that all temptation will become harmless for you because resistance has become your habit; temptation will then seek in vain an unguarded entrance through which it could gain access to you!…

Only then are you safe and secure, only then can one put trust in you!

Only then will your marriage be so protected that it can give everything it always has to give afresh, in inexhaustible abundance, to a man and woman worthy of experiencing its mystery! – – –

You do not bear just for yourself the most sacred responsibility once you have committed yourself to another person to build with that person the spiritual union of a marriage!

Marriage is also not just: – a ‘human contract’, although the other part of the marriage has  acquired an unconditional right to you, and you still owe ‘faithfulness’ to it even if it breaks this faithfulness through deceit. – – –

Every single vow between man and woman in which both parts commit themselves to union in marriage represents a cosmic event; it binds together not only the two spouses, – binds them not only in the face of all mankind, but extends with the ‘yes’ as far as the highest spiritual world! – – –

It can only be dissolved when ‘death’ separates both parts of the marriage, or when – for the soundest and most weighty reasons – both parts are compelled to free themselves of each other by revoking their vow   – together again, just as it was once  made, – before each other, before all mankind and also before the substantial spirit; – unless one part leaves the other without such revocation, or otherwise makes it impossible for the other part to maintain the  vow…

As long as your vow rightly exists you have a threefold obligation from which no ‘God’ could free you! – –

Responsibility is required of you, even if during this short period of time, – which even the longest life on earth constitutes before eternity, – you think you are absolved of all responsibility! – – –

The fact that others seek temptation and offer no resistance to it can never unburden you of your guilt!

You are responsible for yourself in your marriage; no one can help you carry the responsibility, – no one can take it from you, – even if you were found to be pardonable on earth!

You may also be ‘pardonable’ before the countenance of eternity, yet you remain bound to your responsibility, so that you must bear all the consequences of the impulses you have created yourself until the last has run its course in the chain of occurrence! – – –

Once there was One who taught, who was truly permitted to teach from the spirit, that adultery is already committed by anyone who is tempted by the very sight of a woman into desiring her physically.

This saying has lead to much displeasure, and people have tried to twist and turn it because it makes so many feel uncomfortable. –

But I must say to you that all deliberate attempts to nurture and intensify the natural erotic impulses between man and woman, – as soon as they apply to someone other than one’s own spouse, – desecrate marriage, even if this intensification comes nowhere near to physical desire and does not yet lead to spiritual adultery! – – –

You are even desecrating marriage by allowing yourself to be tempted by an image into feeling sexual excitement and surrendering to it! – – –

You must train yourself to observe with admiration beauty in the other sex without allowing even the slightest erotic stimulation to enter your consciousness!

Every true artist who uses the human form as the model for his creation must learn this kind of viewing of his model; he can tell you that in this vision, completely free of eroticism, a wonderful joy of the soul is possible which is denied to all those who experience sexual arousal here, and can never be attained by the lustful…

The fact that you may also find artists who debase their art to become purveyors of lustfulness only goes to show you that artistic ability is not a protection from base enslavement to animal nature unless man seeks to liberate himself from this slavery. – – – –

You cannot control yourself strictly enough if you want to free yourself from this subjection, and learn to control your sexuality! – – –

You must either turn away from every stealthy feeling which cannot pass the strictest of all examinations, or  force it into the right channels which keep completely away from sexuality!

Do not be misled by the lax approach people tend to have towards these things, seeing them with leniency as ‘human’ without being aware of the shame cast by the word alone on the name of  man! – –

Wherever you are not able to unloosen others from their animal bonds to the extent that they resolve to free themselves completely, you must practise forbearance until eventually their hour will strike!

But where they seek to stop you from attaining your freedom, resistance is your sacred and sublime duty! – – –

I do not teach that it is always possible to avoid temptation; rather I show how one can defend oneself against it!

Even if you sought to flee the world, temptation could still find you in your remotest seclusion…

You must educate yourself in such a way that you can counter it wherever and whenever, – certain of victory in advance, – no longer capable of being aroused even if it uses all its guiles to tempt you: – calm in your resistance and with determined will!

Then you will not only keep your marriage holy and protect it from any kind of pollution, but you will also save yourself and the person united with you much suffering, even if it were only the suffering of a temporary sadness which the following day could already be reversed. – – –

Another danger, however, – no less great than the temptation which seems to come from without since you perceive in the external world the occasion that sets it free, – may threaten married happiness from the depths of feeling.

Here too a warning is necessary, here too much misery can easily be averted if there is an immediate recognition of the duty to banish danger…

Within every person on this earth there is an inner sphere which he barely knows himself, and which he is even less capable of revealing fully to a another person, – not because some secret must here be concealed, or what is too sublime cannot be expressed in words, – instead: because man here knows too little about himself…

Now it can happen that the union of two people in marriage tempts them into striving for mutual disclosure even where the imperative command requires: concealment – very suddenly they see with horror a mutual disappointment which they have summoned forth themselves, and for which only self-created phantoms, showing an unreal distortion of their own images, provide a more than questionable guarantee. – –

People believe they must expose even their innermost beings to each other; they then recoil in horror when they think they see themselves finally with souls laid bare, – not suspecting that they have only created puppets for each other and believe in these more than in all reality. –

Two people who in their innermost beings have always felt themselves to be one are now estranged from each other because they wanted to be true in words where words can never know the truth…

An external event, a meeting, or some other external occurrence unexpectedly allows doubt to germinate: whether they still ‘belong’ completely to each other. Immediately they mistrust all the assurance of feeling in order to delve and bore further into themselves until they imagine they have finally discovered each other to the very core.

They have dissected themselves alive, and since they have been unable to find each other in this way, they have fashioned out of their own intestines the phantom in which they think they actually recognise themselves. –

And so they show each other this spawn of delusion, and, horror-filled, they feel repulsed by the sight of it. – –

Most extreme misery has been created in this way from pure folly, and many a marriage which should have stood before God, has been destroyed through a will to find the truth which was bound to lead to error, since it trusted words more than the inner assurance of experienced feeling in which alone the truth would have been found…

It is, however, not only not necessary to dig up before each other those things which, in that place where one scarcely knows oneself, will deceive feeling as a vague stirring: – it is rather always fatal to persist in dragging these things out which are still unclear in the light of one’s own consciousness shimmering at times brightly, at other times darkly in the most jarring colours, in order to force them into the moulds of certain words! – –

A word is quickly uttered whose consequences can never be eradicated in a long human life!

With these vague stirrings, however, which can not show any clearly defined forms, words will moreover always have to falsify, coarsen and exaggerate if they are to attempt to give form and expression to what is inexpressible and unformed…

Words are then uttered which terrify, even while tongues are compelled to force them out shrilly, as though demons were pursuing them…

In the very next instance one would like to revoke what has been said, if one did not already have on one’s lips even more offensive words…

Words one never intended to say appear from depths one never knew existed, and these words have a convincing force for us, as for others, though they bear witness to everything but the truth…

Once they have been spoken, however, no power on earth can pull them back into that unknown realm and one is only hesitatingly capable of feebly believing the serious revocation following  later. – –

And yet they have belied one another only out of a mad delusion, – while they finally wanted to tell each other ‘the truth’ – in a way as if that had never happened! – –

This is particularly the case when also anger and violence sought to ensure that the words had the desired effect! – – –

On calm contemplation one will soon notice how the appearance of truth disappears from these words, – indeed, often one will discover that only the opposite of what one had felt to be ‘true’ in one’s delusion, would have given an unadulterated version of the truth…

But this realisation unfortunately comes far too late, and repentance will now be able to change little. – –

If one wants then to try once more to get rid of the misery which continually sucks its nourishment from prematurely born words, one is indeed in bitter distress, – and if one finally succeeds, the misery will still leave traces behind which can never be completely expunged. – –

It would have been far easier to have resisted the words beforehand and never to have given expression to things which had no right to become words! – – –

The things which seek concealment in that inner realm where man remains a stranger to himself, have good grounds for demanding concealment, and never should one want to force them violently into the harsh light of day!

Those things needing rest are always best left at rest so that they do not destroy in wild rage the things they should construct! – –

Even in striving to sound one’s own depths one must learn to master oneself and avoid the temptation to sound bottomless depths, – there to disturb life where it feels the urge for form which can only develop in conditions of constant rest…

Every vague stirring of inner confusion will then only be manifested as a transitional stage of a completely different form of feeling, – for whenever feeling seeks to create a fixed form it needs an opposite against which it must place itself, in order to overcome  it! – – –

Two people who are sure of their love in their marriage and yet want all the time to put each other to the test to ‘prove’ to one another their love in words too, are running the risk of destroying the happiness they should create for themselves even before it can rise freely from its foundations! –

You should never want to put the proof of words next to whatever your innermost feeling proves to you!

Not even when a vague stirring of an indistinctly surging movement of feelings leads you astray within yourself, so that what formerly was assured in feeling is now questioned by you! – –

Wait calmly for an answer from within yourself and practice silence until you have received it!

In silence you will surely master every disturbance to your feeling!

In silence your rest will return to you, and soon you will once more be certain of your feeling!

Then you will be horrified at every word that hovered previously on your tongue!

You will be grateful to your silence!…

It has protected your marriage from much  misery. – – –

But now you are truly permitted to speak!

You have newly attained happiness and joy, and each of your words will now testify to happiness and joy!

Trembling you still think back to that dark day which saw you tempted and in danger of cursing the things you must now bless from the whole of your soul! –

Truly: – that you were able to be silent where speech would have been a curse, – that will now become a blessing for your marriage! – – –