"Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. 
They're in each other all along."

We receive a certain amount of mail from friends whose experience of passion involves temptation, concealment and, unhappily, betrayal and guilt. Perhaps it would be appropriate to relate these concepts to the themes of Saint-Sulpice.  

Without question, in our complex society, passion can be problematic even when it does not involve infidelity. It can distract us from our work, it can destabilize existing relationships, break hearts and, when it does lead to affairs, it can produce children of broken marriages. 

But, dear friends, these are issues for thoughtful consideration, not for moralizing! An infidelity, contemplated or accomplished, is not a situation for rushed judgment or impulsive action; but rather for sitting down to a bottle of wine* (affairs can be quite expensive) and some excellent accompaniments -- a baguette, cheese, a few Lebanese olives. So, dear visitors, relax and indulge the temptation to reflect.  

*For the wine, by the way, we would recommend something dry, Greek and soulful, to lead us, in mood, toward what Lawrence Durrell called "the plum-dark hills" of Elysium. Should one of the 55,000,000 bottles of the 97 Beaujolais Nouveau have found its way to your table, that would be just fine as well. 

Let us say, then, that you have not only become attracted to a person other than your spouse; you are considering, despite your best judgment and intentions, following through. Let's further suppose that it is not a superficial attraction; in fact you feel that you and the other person have an inner connection -- perhaps one more profound than anything you have ever experienced. But you have not acted on your passion -- you may even hold it in secret from the one with whom you have so inconveniently fallen in love.  

After a sip or two, allowing the aromas and colors of our repast to mingle in the senses, there are three thoughts that take uppermost position in our minds:  

1. real passion, in the sense that one experiences a "soul-level" connection with another person, is an awakening; it is an initiation (that is the say, the opening of a new dimension of experience and the revelation of a new side of the self) and should be treated as an opportunity for spiritual development. (What an "initiation" is, beyond that, in the romantic context, can be discussed later.)   

2. conflict is demoralizing. We need to seek a third path between denial and betrayal, between the yes and the no; in the case of profound attraction, i.e., passion (remember, we are talking about love, not a superficial interlude), neither flat-out denial of desire nor thoughtless surrender to it present the most desirable option.  

3. one is tempted for a reason and those reasons are not always understood; thus while no responsible person would recommend having an outside romantic liaison, it is not necessary to view it as a catastrophe under all circumstances.  
 
It is certainly the case that we are not isolated; we approach each of our relationships from the vantage of participating, as it were "organically", in a network of engagements. This network is social, emotional, biological, both conscious and unconscious. Thus when we are attracted by another person, our experience is obviously shaped by our position, by whether we are married or not, committed elsewhere or not; whether we have ever experienced the full opening of our passion with another person or not. Those who have never experienced being one of the lovers in that Persian garden we see in certain ancient and sacred paintings, will be unconsciously seeking to unveil in themselves that dimension of bliss; and so formidable is the role of desire in perception, it seems that the qualities we perceive in others can actually be created by it.  

Hence, our attention turns to Venice and the whole theater of reflections, veils, silhouetted figures, gondolas, silent movement on canals at night, sound of water lapping at the oar, distant lights in the mist -- the intrigue of passion. Venice, which rises from water like emotions from the unknown heart, is the city that holds an annual carnival, a masked ritual; it is an emotional fantasy and fabulously imaginative stage whose intricate interconnecting waterways describe the occult and intimate way in which emotions flow and merge in and through the edifice of our social architecture. Navigating Venice, we can begin to intuit how romance "steals" its way into our consciousness, and how it can navigate, cloaked and unrecognized, past those who are as if frozen in their mundane lives. 

Romantic perception is as different from mundane awareness as a glimpse of lovers meeting on the Ponte Rialto at twilight is from images of urban decay. Venice is more than a place, it is a perceptual spell, an atmosphere, a certain emotion of suspense, and the city offers to tourists a merest fragment of herself; with Venice, as with romance, one has the definite sensation of not knowing it all, of not having exhausted the possibilities. Venice is, in short, fascinating, and the city's ambiance is inherently erotic.  

In a similar fashion, the one who attracts us is veiled, "clothed" partly by the world and partly by our own subjectivity, if not our fantasy. Defining this composite figure, steeped in ambiguity, there is always an alluring gradation of light and shadow, the manifest and the hidden. The visions of Titian, the consummate master of Venetian atmosphere, speak to us, even through aging varnish, of the intimate relationship of light and form, of beauty and adoration. The richness of Venice as a symbol is due to the fact that although it reveals much, it always intimates much more. Every form is enveloped by vibrating color and energy which are both a veil and a pedestal. There is always the pregnant horizon, as in Giorgione's Tempest, or a dusky woodland scene as in his (and not Titian's!) "Pastoral Concert"; a fusion of color with the sfumato (Leonardo's "smoke") in which the lovely features of the desired one are nested and submerged; it is the world of the lover. And, as an aside, it also explains the odd isolation of the lover: it is because this entire jeweled, mysterious and profound setting is poorly perceived, if at all, by people around the lover, that others sometimes wonder (to borrow an insight from Roland Barthes) what a friend, who has fallen in love, could possibly "see" in so-and-so. 

It is not by accident, therefore, that Marivaux, the author of so many explorations of the romantic experience, and such a prominent force in what can really be called the 18th C.  wave of perception leading to the modern idea of passion, drew his patterns from Italian, and Venetian, theatrical sources.    

It is the function of Venice to hypnotize and sway to sleep the mundane "sentinel" (the watching consciousness); and in so doing, to provide the necessary setting for the play of maskings and unmaskings of which romantic adventure consists. Marivaux clearly satirizes the rigid and purely materialistic personalities who function as the sentinels of reason -- such as the mother of Araminte in False Confessions. The edifices of a city with its architecture founded in and surrounded by water, seem an apt representation of the relationship between passion and order. Even the summer stench of the canals seems to attest to the dark and decadent side of desire -- passion that degrades to lust or simply becomes stagnant in its own obsessions. 

Passion, being inherently dangerous to social order, is disguised; volatile, reflective, pervasive, it shifts delicately and cunningly from figure to figure, disclosure to disclosure. The heart is subtle and quick. Venice has been called "a city of glimpses", and this is also apt, for glimpses are part of romantic awareness. In any city, a face at another table in a restaurant, or an interesting person getting into a taxi -- a snapshot of a look suffused with mystery and promise and erotic completion -- can plunge us in a single moment into a Venice of the mind.  
 

"You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride, 
you have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes, 
with one jewel of your necklace." 
-- Song of  Solomon, 4:9

Passionate temptation would not be such a dangerous force if, on an essential level, it was not perceived as being an avatar of the self. It can lead to physical temptation because it steals into the inner being; it integrates into itself a spiritual conversion that overturns the catechism of the mundane world.  

Passion, once known, presents itself as one's true self, so that it becomes a matter of integrity to allow it to express itself.  What it intimates, then, is that it is in some way not only futile but morally wrong to resist, since such resistance would constitute a denial of the truth.  

It is for this reason that passion can be and often is equally a romantic, erotic and religious experience. It seems ethical and unethical, sacred and profane at the same time.  

These paradoxes, which so afflict lovers who are stunned to find themselves swaying on the precipice of betrayal, come not from some superficial and philandering aspect of the personality, but from the deepest self. Although it might have started under the aspect of something dark and threatening to the order of life, passion begins to be perceived as a long-waited-for healing force, an ecstatic integration, in which the heart of the lover can at last be brought into the realm that is its proper domain. "Until I met you I was as one who is dead." Infidelity becomes possible because what it means to be true to oneself is redefined.  

The Venetian carnival points to the link between the physical and the spiritual; wholeness appears possible for the first time. It presents an arousal that is not divisive or evil, but that promises to heal the schism between virtue and desire. 
 

Here then is the theme of Saint-Sulpice in its essential form: the bridge from the lover to the mystic, from flesh to spirit, and back again. The mystic's ruling passion is the persistently and directly experienced presence of the divine. The lover is similarly aware, often in the most subliminal ways, of the beloved whose presence seems to "haunt" one's inner life. Just as the mystic might be a perceived threat to religious hierarchies -- those who experience God directly might dispense with priestly intermediaries --, the lover sometimes is a threat to social order, because a person caught in the sweep of passion obeys different rules. Citizens of the mundane world seem to fail to appreciate the full scope of the drama into which the lover is cast. Indeed, the light projected into the soul of the lover can be overpowering, even terrifying, and it is a  luminosity that should not be faced until the lover is ready to be "awakened". The beloved is still mostly concealed, but that very concealment arouses a desire that reveals the self of the lover. Thus one approaches the beloved in glimpses, for she is not merely sweet and lovely, she is awe-inspiring. 
 

"You are beautiful as Tir'zah, my  love, 
comely as Jerusalem, 
terrible as an army with banners. 
Turn away your eyes from me, 
for they overwhelm me." 
-- Song of Solomon, 6: 4

Thus there is also a parallel between the inner work of the mystic, and the surprisingly harsh discipline to which the passionate lover can be subjected. Passion is forced to incorporate certain controls. One must learn to seek and to love, but without dependence -- or, with a unique kind of dependence that is faithful but not clinging. The lover who is afraid that the telephone won't ring, or that the hypnotic spell of attraction has been ruptured,  is subjected to real tests of character. One is asked, like the yogi, to be passionate and detached at the same time. 
 

Passion also returns us to the challenge of the contemplative: just as one cannot possess the truth of God, but one can only be more and more completely possessed by it; just as God remains unknown because the divine is the fountain from which all transformation and understanding spring; so no one can possess the beloved, because it is of the essence that the beloved remain that which is ceaselessly desired. In love, possession is nine-tenths of destruction. To aim at possession is to misinterpret the nature of fulfillment. The gift of desiring, if one learns to manage it, is that is it does not degenerate, it will ennoble and transform. 

Thus, for the adventurous, a new task begins, aimed at a synthesis of opposites -- using one's passion to fuel what the great medieval Sufi mystic Ibn al-'Arabi called the "Creative Imagination".  

The ultimate function of intense romantic desire, of the type that comes to the self as a revelation of "how it has always been", is not only the biological imperative of procreation. It is to regenerate the self on a new level which means, in a new world; it is linked to the creative and imaginative powers of the soul. The erotic imagination which endows the beloved with every gift, every ornament, the fever not only to love but through that loving gain entry to a new world, a heaven, is the work of a powerful creative imagination  that is coupled to the sexual drive. This ornate layering and accumulation of ornament, which is synonymous with Baroque -- and later Rococo -- art, is not just decorative in intent, but transformative. It aims at nothing less than transubstantiation. 
 

"I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh's chariots. 
Your cheeks are comely with ornaments, 
your neck with strings of jewels. 
We will make you ornaments of gold, studded with silver."   
-- Song of Solomon, 1: 9-11.

Desire and passion that do not seek to possess the object that enflames the heart, bring us to contemplation; this is a place where the lover and the mystic meet. It is the wine, the extracted essence of the experience. It is a delicacy not different from tenderness. It is the difference between eroticism and being limited to purely genital sexuality as the dominant model of pleasure. 
 

"Your graceful thighs are like jewels, 
the work of a master hand. 
Your navel is a rounded bowl 
that never lacks mixed wine." 
-- Song of Solomon, 7: 1

What is the vision of beauty worshipped by the soul?, then, is really the question, on some level, equivalent to "who am I"? Is it possible to serve, not only one's passion, but also the ideal which generated it? The lover breathes within the vision of the beloved. When we rush to possess, or to act too selfishly on our passion, we draw this vision back into ourselves, into the soul forces from which it emanated to our view. One cannot possess by force, one can only diminish oneself; the beloved is then obscured by lust. We cannot stand the truth, so we devour it. We reabsorb it in order to remain unchanged -- this is the myth of Chronos, Father Time, eating his children. As we know from that myth, eventually Chronos will be toppled by Zeus, the child who escaped being devoured; moreover the myth tells us that Zeus was hidden, i.e., masked, from his father. Physical passion decays with time; what escapes being destroyed by time, is the spirit. 

If there is a way to "fulfill" the relationship with the third person -- that is, the beloved who is other than one's spouse -- and to do it without committing betrayal, then here is the signpost pointing to that way. If betrayal has already occurred, then here is the path leading toward healing. If the passion is genuine, the temptation is to renewal. It would be self-defeating, and unnecessary, to return to the "previous life", now burdened with guilt and without having extracted the vital forces of creative life from the experience of passion. So we ask again: is it possible to serve, not only one's passion but also, beyond it, the ideal which generated it? The lover's inner journey need not be inimical to marriage. Through adoration (and here we drink deeply of our Mediterranean wine) one can find the path of the lover's evolution to the mystic.  

Venice, and Marivaux, point in that direction. Passion presents itself through many masks; we can only ask what is its name -- that is to say, it's secret, its provenance -- by approaching, surrendering, withdrawing, approaching again. The ideal beloved, both spirit and flesh, beckons us onward. "You are the mirror, and the face in the mirror", said Rumi the Persian. And thus Saint-Sulpice on the Web, evoking the name of the church where Delacroix's Jacob still wrestles the angel for the secret of eternity, remains a resource for lovers on the way.