Mars and Venus

Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, his magisterial analysis of the poetry of the First World War (whose centenary is this summer—Archduke Ferdinand was shot on June 28th) notes that the wisdom of classical antiquity made Mars the lover of Venus. It’s counter-intuitive, of course, that the heights of tenderness should be so closely linked to the depths of bloodshed. Yet, love and war each bring out the greatest expressions of human virtue and vice. There are literal connections—military encampments provide a market for prostitution in wars since time immemorial—but the link is deeply rooted in our language and our whole mode of thought. Young men so often consider it normal to consume both bloodthirsty video games and pornography.

He notes the inevitable language of  aggression and strife in sexual pursuit.  Fussell takes this insight as license for reading homoeroticism into the poetry of war, noting a recurring theme of the precious vulnerability of boys in battle.  Be that as it may, I think there’s something far more fundamental in the human heart that causes us to intertwine eros and combat. Be struck anew by this passage from The Two Towers:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?

Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? 

Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? 

Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? 

They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; 

The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. 

Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning, 

Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

It is a lament for the warrior glory of Eorl the Young, who led the Rohirrim into The Battle of Celebrant centuries ago. Yet why does the curious mixture of delight, yearning, and loss that the poem stirs so closely resemble the pangs of lost love?

There is a vast amount of metaphysics to be written on this question that I am not capable of writing. But I will boldly suggest two salient reasons. First, battle and romance both remind us of our simultaneous mortality and immortality. A man never feels more divine than when his beloved smiles in his direction; Achilles was never more “godlike” than when he broke the Trojan battle line. Yet combat is inescapably beastly and bodily too, moments of glory drowned in hours of slogging misery. And, as C.S. Lewis remarked in The Four Loves, the paradox of eros is that it transports us outside of ourselves while always coming back to the awkward reality of naked bodies.

And love and war share the ability to make us believe that only one thing is needed to make all the world right again. We exiles east of Eden are very easily beguiled into believing that only to possess the beloved would cure every ill. Of course that’s idolatrous. Militarism is the name of the blasphemy that would say that to beat the enemy is triumph over evil once and for all. It’s not nearly so simple; for one thing, it doesn’t defeat the evil in our own hearts. But they are powerful lies because they remind us cynics that this poor, mad, sorrowing world actually can be redeemed. Maybe we can begin to understand why the medieval romancers, in their wisdom, linked military exploits to courtship. The perfect warrior had to be the perfect lover, too. For the Warrior-Prince of Heaven is also the Bridegroom.