The origin of ‘spiritual pain’.-- One must not mistake the “social contract” for morality. The social contract is much older, it is intended merely to expedite the functions of a society. We agree on the most basic things possible: not to steal, not to kill, (unless the person belongs to a different tribe or society) etc. Morality is much different. It evolves out of metaphysical, philosophical, and religious valuations of certain drives, impulses, passions. Just as the social contract evolves to allow the polis or social-political body to function more effectively, so morality evolves to allow man’s inner society, the inner polis of drives, passions, and hungers, to function more effectively. The former is very archaic, present even in the oldest and most isolated tribes, but morality is something we only see in higher culture. The contract, a product of reason, aided man in the struggle against physical pain and the forces of nature. But when life was settled, and the polis itself was firmly established, the ‘state of nature,’ the antagonism between man and nature, was drawn inward, was spiritualized, and man experienced the ‘inner antagonism of the drives’ and a consciousness of himself, or rather a ‘conscience’ of himself- the idea of “man” for the first time evolved here, where formerly there was, so to speak, only a fellow tribesman and an animal. For primitive man life was an endless multiplicity of experience- the confusion of the drives was not deleterious for him due to the fact that man was constantly engaged with the forces of nature and of beast; the drives were constantly pressed to discharge themselves in the most immediate way. Only when man came upon the period of reflection did this confusion strike him; with no immediate means to vent themselves, their confusion was brought inward, made conscious- ultimately spiritual pain owes itself to this. The full of import of a permanent antagonism of the drives in rerum natura I learned from the French historian Michelet, who used the concept to write a history which looked at man- human subjectivity, as being in a perpetual state of degeneration and reconstitution in so many original forms. In his history he looks for the corruptible, perishable element within a particular instantiation of human subjectivity, and writes a history around the degeneration and regeneration of this element: for him anthropology and history are equivalent terms.
The Greeks pitted themselves against this spiritual pain through art- ultimately they made everything into art, both man and the world; through art they unified certain drives and relieved their antagonism. This is why the Greeks portrayed Eros itself as the ‘inner antagonism’ - the son of penia and poros, lack and excess, which discharged itself in art and, in the vision of Plato, through the ascension of the entire scale of contemplation. But, instead of Eros- an inner antagonism, in Christianity there was transposed into the heart of the individual an ‘absolute longing,’ an inner lack which took the place of Eros and found its answer only in God. The theological category for this inner lack is quite various: finitude, creatureliness, etc. In any case the perfect antagonism was here realized, that one between the finite and infinite, the profane and the divine, the carnal and the holy: the entire order of religious thinking utilizes this antagonism to inform the unity of man’s psychic being. The ‘spiritual pain’ is discharged through the order informed by this perfect antagonism in the contemplation of God. The theological description of such is ‘kenos’ - the act of Christ’s self-emptying before God, which John of the Cross made use of in his own theological speculation. From it he invented the concept of a ‘dark night of the soul,’ in which all mortal and finite passions gradually detach themselves from their mortal and finite objects, through an intensive and terrible process of ‘purification,’ in order to gradually attach themselves to the divine principles. This principle is contained summarily in that strange doctrine of the theologians, dei virtutem sapientiam, “Knowledge is the virtue of God and the sin of man.” In man all knowledge, however wondrous, is communicated to carnal nature; in God, all knowledge, however meager, is communicated to the divine nature.
What is the meaning of the depiction of Eros as both the God of desire and- creation? All desire is the product of a turmoil within the drives, within man’s inner being: the desire for God, thus, a product of the most fervent, most violent war within the drives. Human desire is truly a miraculous thing, one must not suppose that it belongs to any of the beasts. The beasts hunger, the beasts thirst, but each of their hungers and their thirsts have definite objects. Man must invent beauty, he must invent God; until this moment the nature of desire is unconscious, lacks expression, exists only as a turmoil within the drives which longs for a resolution. As I have said before- the Greek conscience was a beautiful testament born out of long periods of reflection; it consisted in man’s invention of a new ideal, in whose image the war of the drives was arrested. When eros was replaced by an inner lack, when the perfect unity of the drives was discerned, so the religious conscience came to take the place of the Greek conscience: this new conscience, un-feminine and un-creative as it is, serves only one purpose, that of warning man when disorder is threatening to break out within the drives, when the sweet note of a ‘temptation’ has entered into the recesses of the heart: it is charged with the labor of constantly maintaining the unity of the drives.