So my plan of posting after each reading didn't work as I had anticipated it to, due to family problems these past two weeks. After a couple of plane rides, hospital visits, and nights spent alone in a huge house, I think we may be on track. So here we go.
Rebreanu's Adam and Eve is unlike anything I've read before, especially compared to his two previous novels, Ion and Forest of the Hanged. This novel's plotline is a male soul seeking its female soulmate throughout seven lives lived on earth from ancient India to modern (early 20th century) Romania. Imbued with Eastern philosophy, Adam and Eve offers a delectable science-fiction love story that spans several lives and characters yet maintains the same "essence." Theoretically, a "spiritual atom" that looses its balance must split into two souls (man and woman) which live material lives and try to find each other "in order to reset the balance" (14). According to the novel's premise, "The man and woman seek each other out in the immense turmoil of human life. A man among millions of men years for only one woman out of millions of women. One man alone and one woman alone[;] no one else. Adam and Eve seeking each other out unconsciously and irresistibly. This is the raison d'etre of man's life. [...] The instinct of love is the reminiscence of divine origin. Love alone can unite the soul of a man to the soul of a woman to make them again part of the spiritual world. This love is the divine fruit of the human soul. God is the image of love in man" (15).
I find this idea quite interesting, especially when contrasted with C. S. Lewis's take on human love as it reflects divinity. In The Great Divorce, Lewis writes: "There's something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a fiercer devil. [...] Someone must say in general what's been unsaid among you [humans] this many a year: that love, as mortals understand the word, isn't enough. Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country [heaven]: but none will rise again until it has been buried. [...] There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels" (104-106).
Two lengthy quotes, I know. But the contrast between the two is amazing, is it not? In Rebreanu, love is the very essence of a person's being, and a person must find his or her soulmate in order to reset an intricate balance. But the problem with this philosophy is that it begins and ends with humans. Say Rebreanu's philosophy (as espoused in this novel) is true--what happens once the soul reaches equilibrium? To what end its existence? Lewis intervenes at this point and adds that natural affection--though beautiful and necessary--is only good when it is found in God, flows from Him, and is returned to Him.
I don't know if this makes sense to my readers, but for me, the contrast between Rebreanu and Lewis couldn't be more enlightening.
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Exactly, Rebreanu seems to confuse the passionate love between a man and a woman with divinity itself. He writes as if this love, this finding of one's soul mate, is the pinnacle of the divine. This union, Rebreanu suggests, is the greatest good, and no moral constructs are allowed to stand in its way. In fact, the desire of two soul mates is presented as superseding all moral codes.
ReplyDeleteLewis provides an excellent counter view to Rebreanu’s view.