I just finished reading “It’s in His Kiss”, book 7 of the Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn. In it, Hyacinth Bridgerton has serious questions about Gareth, her potential partner. Quinn writes that Hyacinth is unsure whether his behaviour is worthy of a man she would “pledge her troth to”. I thought, “Troth? I’ve never seen that word before. It’s the main morpheme of the word “betrothed”… but what does that word mean?” “To Betroth” is defined as “entering into a formal agreement to marry”, obvious enough. Troth, according to my dictionary, is a Middle English variant of Truth. So there is a deep linguistic, or even green language, connection between marriage and Truth.
As I was pondering this, my university training in complex system’s theory kicked in.
Take three lines. They have certain measurable characteristics – length, arrangement, colour, etc. But when those three lines are organized into a triangle, you get emergent properties – each intersection now has an angle, and all the angles add up to 180, etc. From this, the whole field of trigonometry emerges, too, with sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, cosecant, and their hyperbolic counterparts. So a whole new swath of information becomes available, depending on how the original parts are arranged. Put another way, any formation (or whole) is significant depending on the specific relationship of the parts.
So a whole set of emergent Truths becomes available when the randomly organized three lines are made to relate as a triangle.
If the triangle above is the mathematical example of a kind of ‘holy expansiveness’ that can occur when separate parts relate (or harmonize) as a whole, then I was thinking that “betrothal” would be the human-relationship example of the same holistic principle. If you take three separate lines and organize them into a triangle, you get this huge expansion of Truths for understanding the cosmos. These truths lead to further truths. If you take two human beings and organize (or harmonize) them in marriage, you also get an expansion of Truths for understanding the cosmos (courtship, chivalry, family, sex, honour, responsibility, etc.). Love, then, could be said to be the ‘trigonometry’ of marriage.
As a brief aside, J.G. Bennett, however, cautions against conflating sex and love, in his book Sex, p. 21:
“We should never confuse sex and love, they are quite different things. This can be approached first of all through the scale of energies. The energy of love, the unitive energy, stands above that of sex, the creative energy. Love is beyond.
Most people confuse certain powerful sentiments and feelings in themselves with the presence of love. This is simply when sex energy enters the feelings and usually has very little to do with the truly unitive power of love. The result is sentimentality or egoistic desire.
It is quite right to speak of the possibility of love between ourselves and plants and animals as well as with other human beings of our own or the other sex; but because of this we must be wary of crediting even the most ‘uplifting’ emotions [ie. Dopamine rush] with the quality of love. Gurdjieff instructed people not to pretend to love human beings but to begin with plants and animals. With people, our egoism gets in the way. Even with Nature, our Mother, we will tend to think that love originates in ourselves. Whereas, in reality, it is Nature that loves us, because She is pure.
For there to be an indwelling of love we must be opened and emptied of self. A special action is involved, that is little understood, because it is far beyond the reach of our ordinary selves. So long as we remain attached to our own worth [ie. self importance] love cannot enter.”
Now, it should be said that our Middle Ages predecessors were not talking about pledging “one’s Truth” in terms of justifying the arrogant, “my truth” celebration of subjectivity we see all around us today. That would be a validation, or crystallization of the very self-importance that Bennett is warning against above. It’s kind of like two Newtonian billiard balls that suddenly smash together by the Law of Accident – and that’s the nihilist version of love. There’s no indication of a quantum entanglement of the human heart.
I think “pledging one’s Truth” referred to marriage as the agreement of two Souls to share their essences, to open, to relinquish the singular ego and old patterns and allow them to transform into harmonized constituents of a new dual system. One’s personal subjectivity is still there, but rather than that being the terminus of a life’s path, it’s the starting point of a grand adventure, a ‘looking upwards’ and ‘looking forwards’ towards the possibility of Objective love. Expansion. True love. Truth. Troth. Marriage. And, as Bennett indicates, immortality (growing a Soul).
From p.9 of Sex:
“… the spiritual nature of man, that is his will, is always expressed in a threefold way. For there to be a complete act of any kind, three different roles must be fulfilled and united: these are the affirmative, receptive and reconciling roles. The affirmative and receptive are prefigured in the two human sexes. It is because there can be union of the man and the woman that is a truly independent reconciliation that human immortality is possible.”
Thinking about the triangle-trigonometry/marriage-love comparison from a different angle, we are in a post-
truth era. There is no more common sense understanding of male and female, let alone the triad of “male-female-child”. So there is an attack on the truth of the ‘constituent parts’ of marriage, Love, family, and as such, an attack on the very relations and processes whereby all human life continues on earth. In a word - nihilism. We are also in a post-
troth era. Marriages aren’t as common, because they require sacrifice, commitment, a letting go of egoistic desires, and a choosing a life of work, care and responsibility. The marriages that do occur don’t last, and often degrade into vicious custody battles with kids as pawns. People aren’t having as many kids anymore. Family values have been degraded to a tired joke. Somehow Mothers and Fathers are dismissed as ‘conservative’ linguistic concepts – as if they’re only some kind of historical mistake, and not expressions of ancient divine archetypes with generations of depth and richness. The post-truth, post-troth, maybe even ‘post-Love’ era seems like a heavily sedated mass of lost Souls all desperately trying to feel something real, but duped or scared into looking in all the wrong places. It’s lethargic and docile, fearful and mechanical. And on and on.
Reading these books, the contrast is absolutely huge – this project feels like a kind of cultural reconciling force that is balancing out the over-abundance of nihilist negativity in most socially-sanctioned ways of being in relationship. I’ve been delighted to see the daring of the characters, the emotion, the adventure of truly seeing another Soul, of being seen, being witnessed, and being found by someone, and the natural, healing aspect of sex, of allowing for transformation to take place (often in the most hilarious, humble ways, with all of our tantrums and delusions included as a necessary part of the tale).
This is described wonderfully in Bennett, commenting on marriage, and finding one’s Truth. In Sex, p. 20:
“For all of us there us a pattern of sexual experience which is truly our own, and another , which we may, knowingly or unknowingly, graft onto it, concerned with what we think will make us superior. This is all personality interfering with sex.
There are compatible and incompatible essences. I think it is fair to say that if we had no interference from our personality, and especially none from imagination, we should find ourselves attracted to compatible essences and not attracted to incompatible ones. It is then that sex begins to have a fully shared character, where the man is helping the woman to be more fully a woman and the woman is helping the man to be more fully a man.
It is then that it is possible to talk about marriage in the true sense of the word. Marriage becomes possible when here is a complementarity between the man and the woman. This cannot be through personality. It is a major step towards release from egoism and has tremendous implications for the human soul.”
So through this project, we get to experience marriage, perhaps in the
true sense of the word, and also get a taste of the '
special action' of that prefigures love. And with all of us doing this together, we are all 'constituent parts' of this reading project, relating, and harmonizing, which inevitably results in an particular 'emergent emotional geometry'. Which probably means in plain-speak that as we engage here together, life gets richer and deeper for us all. That's how it's felt for me, anyways.
So, without further ado - here's to some more 'tremendous implications' for us all!
. They both come from families that were less than loving and respectable, and even if today the rule is to judge the person by its actions and not by its familial background, there is still that very human desire to be born in a loving, tight-knit family, to have a place you can return to, a safe haven.
