Denis de Rougemont: Love in the Western World. Montgomery Belgion translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
While “classical Greek used at least sixteen different terms to designate love in all its forms,” modern languages make fewer distinctions and modern language speakers often fail to keep them straight. Today, “the West is distinct from other cultures not only by its invention of passionate love in the twelfth century and the secular elaboration of conjugal love, but by its confusion of the notions of eros, agape, sexuality, passion.” For de Rougemont, genuine love “seeks the welfare of the Other”; a loving soul controls itself, not the Other, and such love constitutes “the active principle of all human freedom.” In considering this book, readers should never forget its publication date, 1940, when the Nazis rolled into Paris. French Swiss de Rougemont, a Personalist and friend of Emmanuel de Mounier, protested Nazi tyranny in Europe and was exiled to the United States after Berlin applied pressure to Berne. Nazism can be understood as a grotesque deformation of German Romanticism, closely associated with German nationalism, which de Rougemont charges with continuing the derangement of Europeans’ understanding of love that had begun centuries earlier with the myth of Tristan and Iseult.
Several versions of the myth were set down, beginning in the twelfth century. King Mark of Cornwall charges his nephew and knight, Tristan, with escorting Iseult, and Irish princess, from Ireland to Cornwall, where she is to wed the king as part of a peace agreement between the two kingdoms. En route, they inadvertently drink a love potion, which causes them to violate the fealty both owe to the king. After the arranged marriage, the lovers commit adultery; their discovery threatens the peace, foreign and domestic. In one version, King Mark kills Tristan.
De Rougemont finds in this the archetype of the modern European novel, typically a story of fatal love. “Happy love has no history”; “romance only comes into existence when love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.” Fatal love is passion, which “means suffering” and ruins married love, as celebrated (for example) in Edmund Spenser’s beautiful Epithalamium:
But if ye saw that which no eyes can see,
The inward beauty of her lively spright
Garnisht with heavenly guifts of high degree,
Much more then would ye wonder at the sight….
There dwells sweet lawe and constant chastity,
Unspotted faith and comely womanhod,
Regard 0f honour and mild modesty,
There vertue reynes as Queene in royal throne,
And giveth lawes alone.
Since Tristan and Iseult, Europeans have confusedly celebrated both marriage and passion. Love and marriage: you can’t have one without the other, but only so long as you understand married love as Spenser understands it, not as passion, which is by its nature unruly. Passion goes poorly with marriage. The story of Tristan and Iseult is the “one great European myth of adultery.” By “myth” de Rougemont means a code of conduct, a story that enables listeners to see “certain types of constant relations and to disengage thee from the welter of everyday appearances.” The source of the myth is always anonymous, shrouded in mystery. It needs to be, as “no myth arises as long as it is possible to keep to the obvious and express this obvious openly and directly. Unlike an ordinary work of art, a myth compels; “reason, if not silenced, becomes at least ineffective,” as the myth wields power over our dreams. “A myth is needed to express the dark and unmentionable fact that passion is linked with death, and involves the destruction of any one yielding himself up to it with all his strength.” The myth of Tristan and Iseult “set[s] passion in a framework within which it could be expressed in symbolical satisfactions.” Passion itself, obviously, already existed and would continue to exist if the myth disappeared, since passion is by nature. Catastrophe occurs when natural passion rules the other natural capacities of souls. The myth “operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal instead of being feared like a malignant fever,” as seen not only in romantic novels but in Hitler’s impassioned Mein Kampf and his mesmerizing histrionics, which take passion for Germany and the ‘Aryan race’ beyond the point of insanity. “What I aim at,” Rougemont writes, “is to bring the reader to the point of declaring frankly, either ‘That is what I wanted!’ or else ‘God forbid!'”
To do so, “remaining deaf and blind to the ‘charms’ of the tale, I am going to try to summarize ‘objectively’ the events it relates and the reasons which it either gives for these events or very oddly omits.” He begins with the name, ‘Tristan,’ which derives from triste, sadness, in the knight’s life the death of his father before he was born and the death of his mother in childbirth. As to the love potion, it too is clearly associated also with death. In the story, passionate love and death intertwine like lovers; their one issue will be the death of them both.
Feudal rule consists of fidelity between the lord and his vassal. Without it, the social and political order of medieval Europe will decay and collapse. Courtly love, love between the lover and his lady, romance, the rule of chivalry, challenges the rule of feudality, the rule of marriage and of the aristocratic regime. [1] If the ideal is realized, it destroys that regime. Tristan delivers Iseult to King Mark only after drinking the love potion “because the rule of courtly love did not allow a passion of this kind to ‘turn into a reality'”; in this way, “Tristan chooses to respect feudal fealty, which is thus made to disguise and equivocally to abet courtly fealty.” In the love affair, “everything holds together and is connected after the manner of a dream, and not in accordance with our lives.” “Passionate love wants ‘the faraway princess,’ whereas Christian love wants ‘our neighbor.'”
The ruinous thing is that the lovers act according to a necessity, the power of the potion, a necessity “that is stronger than the need of their happiness,” which requires the rule of passion by the better parts of the soul. This leads to irresolvable conflict of the Romance: “the demon of courtly love which prompts the lovers in their inmost selves to the devices that are the cause of their pain is the very demon of the novel as we in the West like it to be.” De Rougemont invites his reader to pull back from our passionate love of passion. True, “it would be idle to condemn; swooning cannot be condemned.” But the eros of the philosopher, dispassionate, will “meditate in the act of swooning”: “perhaps knowledge is but the effort of a mind that resists the headlong fall and holds back in the midst of temptation.”
In so doing, de Rougemont observes that “the lovers do not seem to be brought together in any normal human way.” “Everything goes to show that they would never have chosen one another were they acting freely.” This puts them in “a thrillingly contradictory position,” having sinned unintentionally, not freely, therefore putting themselves beyond repentance, beyond forgiveness, beyond reform. “Like all great lovers, they imagine that they have been ravished ‘beyond good and evil’ into a kind of transcendental state outside ordinary human experience, into an ineffable absolute irreconcilable with the world, but that they feel to be more real than the world.” As a wise hermit tells them, “Love by force dominates you.” De Rougemont’s allusion to Nietzsche again glances at Hitler, Nietzsche’s malign dwarf-imposter.
Tristan and Iseult “do not love one another.” “What they love is love and being in love. They behave as if aware that whatever obstructs love must ensure and consolidate it in the heart of each other and intensify it infinitely in the moment they reach the absolute obstacle, which is death.” [2] Their love requires not “one another’s presence but one another’s absence” because they love their passion rather than “its satisfaction or on its living object,” “mutually encouraging their join dream in which they remain solitary.” Similarly, in political life, the tyrant ‘unifies’ his nation by dividing it, focusing the attention of each individual upon the tyrant, who remains an unreachable object of their impassioned longing.
And like tyranny, courtly love conceals a death wish. Tristan and Iseult “are seeking peril for its own sake,” for the thrill of it. Passion seeks the death of the impassioned. In the story, King Mark discovers them asleep together with Tristan’s sword lying between them. He replaces the lover’s sword with his own. “The meaning of this is that in place of the obstruction which the lovers have wanted and have deliberately set up he puts the sign of his social prerogative”—not only social but political—a “legal and objective obstruction.” Tristan takes up the challenge making the ideal of courtly love triumph over “the sturdy Celtic tradition which proclaimed its pride in life” in an attempt to be “redeemed and avenged” in obedience to “the active passion of Darkness.”
The cause of all this, the love potion, is a form of magic. Like myth, “magic persuades without giving reasons, and is perhaps persuasive to precisely the extent that it withholds reasons.” It is “an alibi for passion,” a release from responsibility. “Who would dare admit that he seeks Death and detests offensive Day, that what he longs for with all his being is the annihilation of his being.” In the later poetry of modern Romanticism and its offshoots, the poetes maudit “did dare to make this crowning avowal,” to which sane people replied, “They are mad!” “It is because passion cannot exist without pain that passion makes our ruin seem desirable to us.”
The mystique of Romance thus resembles Christian mysticism, but the resemblance is superficial. The Christian mystics did indeed experience the dark night of the soul, but with “a strict and lucid passion made strict and lucid by their faith in “an altogether personal and ‘luminous’ Will [who] would take the place of theirs.” “Their will power was not seized upon by the nameless of the love potion, a blind force or Nothingness, but by the God who promises His grace, and ‘the living flame of love’ that burns in the ‘deserts’ of the Night.” Passionate love is “the longing for what sears us and annihilates us in its triumph.” This is “the secret which Europe has never allowed to be given away,” the secret of one “who has willed his own fate”—Nietzsche’s amor fati. Its consequence is tyranny and war—yesterday, the great Romancier Napoleon, today Hitler (and, one might well add, Stalin). Western man “reaches self-awareness and tests himself only by risking his life—in suffering and on the verge of death,” which is “the most tenacious root of the war instinct.” One sees this in Machiavelli, in Hobbes, and in Hegel (as de Rougemont remarks), for whom “suffering and understanding are deeply connected,” “death and self-awareness…in league.” “On this alliance, Hegel was able to ground a general explanation of the human mind, and also of human history” in his dialectic, the dialectic of historicism, the doctrine that presents itself politically as either progressivist liberalism or progressivist tyranny. That is, the late-modern rationalism of the ‘administrative state’ oddly owes a sort of debt to Romance, of all things, and especially to Romance’s attempt to realize the Ideal through battles to the death.
The dialectic of Tristan and Iseult has no rational content, however. It is a myth of “passionate love at once shared and fought against, anxious for a happiness it rejects, and magnified in its own disaster—unhappy mutual love.” “They love one another, but each loves the other from the standpoint of self and not from the other’s standpoint.” Because passionate love “disguises a twin narcissism,” “there pierces through their excessive passion a kind of hatred of the beloved.” Which is why it all leads to death. “The god Eros is the slave of death because he wishes to elevate life above our finite and limited creature state. Hence the same impulse that leads us to adore life thrusts us into its negation.” Once declared, passion “wants everything, and especially the unattainable: infinitude in a finite being.” It is a longing that can only be negated, killed, never satisfied.
“Antiquity has left no record of an experience akin to the love of Tristan and Iseult.” Menander speaks for the ‘ancients’ when he calls passionate love a sickness. The eros of Platonism longs for “infinite transcendence” and de Rougemont associates it with the East, with Persian, Gnostic, and Hindu myths that pit spirituality against the flesh in the sort of dualism seen in Manicheism. Every such dualistic “interpretation of the universe holds the fact of being alive in the body to be the absolute woe the woe embracing all other woes; and death it holds to be the ultimate good, whereby the sin of birth is redeemed, and human beings return into the One of luminous indistinction.” They did not experience agape, Christian love, “the incarnation of the Word in the world—and of Light in Darkness—[as] the astounding event whereby we are delivered from the woe of being alive.” Christian dying to the self begins “a new life here below—not the soul’s flight out of the world, but its return in force into the midst of the world,” loving both God and neighbor. “To love God is to obey God, Who has commanded us to love one another,” and “the symbol of Love is no longer the infinite passion of a soul in quest of light, but the marriage of Christ and the Church,” a “truly mutual” love whose object is “the other as he or she really is.” [3]
The East is dualistic as regards the world, monistic as regards the soul’s fulfillment, absorption into the one. The ancient West is dualistic s regards fulfillment, since we have communion with God but not absorption, a union paralleled in marriage. “God is not to be found by means of a limitless elevation of desire. However much our eros may be sublimated, it can never cease to be self.” Paradoxically, however, love as passion arose in the West in “flagrant contradiction between doctrine and moeurs.” This happened in the collision between ancient European paganism, especially in its Epicurean form, and Christianity, in which agapic love collides painfully with the world. The pain of passionate love amounts to “a terrestrial form of the cult of Eros,” a popularized Platonism which makes physical beauty its object,” combined with the pain of Christian struggle. The Church struggled to suppress the cult of Eros, but it transformed itself into the cult of courtly love, the love of the troubadours. “No European poetry has been more profoundly rhetorical” than that of the troubadours, with their “rules of love,” their “high-flown fervor,” their exaltation of women as terrestrial goddesses. The troubadours appeared simultaneously with the Catharist religion, with its neo-Manichean dualism asserting that God is love and the world is evil. With the Cathars, dualism eventuates in monism, as even Satan is finally reconciled to God and there is not eternal damnation. “The condemnation of the flesh, which is now viewed by some as characteristically Christian, is in fact of Manichaean and ‘heretical’ origin. For it must be borne in mind that when Saint Paul speak of the ‘flesh’ he means not the physical body but the whole of the unbelieving man—body, mind, faculties, and desires—and hence his soul, too.” Troubadours and Cathars frequented the same houses in southern France, extolled chastity instead of marriage, and preferred death to life on earth. Cathars jibed that the Roman Catholic Church (ROMA) inverted the very name of love (AMOR). They “extolled the Lady of Thoughts, the Platonic Idea of the feminine principle”—Diotima—and “the encouragement of Love contrary to marriage and, at the same time, of chastity,” and this may be seen in the contemporaneous decision to make the Queen in chess the greatest power on the board. Contrary to marriage and to chastity: “courtly love resembles adolescent love when this is yet chaste and hence all the more consuming.” Politically, the twelfth century saw “a marked relaxation of the patriarchal and feudal bond,” which the myth of Tristan and Iseult clearly registers; Cathars generally eschewed political life altogether. In their turn, Christian priests attempted to rechannel this eroticism into worship of the Virgin; “the monastic orders were then being founded were retorts to the orders of chivalry,” and monks were styled Knights of Mary. [4] Both Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas looked somewhat askance at the movement, and understandably so, inasmuch as courtly love’s “terms of expression have been taken up and used by nearly every great mystic in the West,” very much in contrast to the Christianity and Bernard and Thomas, for whom Logos is God and God is Logos.
What the Romantics of the nineteenth century first called ‘courtly love’ spread from southern France to northern France, a movement de Rougemont associates with the marriage of Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, to the future King Louis VII. In de Rougemont’s telling, Eleanor brought her troubadours and courtly love with her, which may explain some of Bernard of Clairvaux’s hostility towards her. Chrétien de Troyes learned “the rules and secret of courtly love” from one of Eleanor’s daughters; he brings courtly love to the Arthurian legend, a legend into which Tristan and Iseult’s story was integrated. After the annulment of her marriage to Louis (she had borne him no male heir) she married Henry, Duke of Normandy, later Henry II of England, bringing courtly love even further north, to the land where the ancient Druids had already practiced a dualistic religion which made Woman a symbol of divinity. In the Irish myth, as distinguished from the earliest version of the French myth as told by the poet known only as Béroul, “what brings disaster” to the lovers is “a secret but unerring wish” rather than “an entirely external fate.” De Rougemont’s interpretation of Tristan and Iseult’s story tracks the convolution of the myth, beginning with fate, the love potion, but uncovering the death wish.
It was Gottried von Strassburg who brought the myth to Germany, also in the twelfth century. Gottfried “discloses better than all the others a fundamental element in the Myth—a sensual fret and a ‘humanistic’ pride that makes up for the fret.” While depicting “the sexual instinct” as a resented “cruel fate” and “tyranny,” pride enters in “because the tyranny is imagined to become a divinizing force—setting man against God—once it is decided to yield to it,” a paradox that “heralds Nietzsche’s amor fati“, and Wagner’s.” Gottfried alludes to Bernard of Clairvaux’s teachings in order to invert them, valorizing darkness and dissolution, not light and salvation. In ‘his’ Church, a bed is substituted for an altar. Gottfried is a Gnostic, believing that one purges instinct only by first yielding to it. “His Tristan is far more profoundly and indisputably Manichaean than the Divine Comedy is Thomist.” Thus, in de Rougemont’s Europe and the West generally, only a half-century or so after Wagner and Nietzsche, “the passion which novels and films have now popularized is nothing else than a lawless invasion and flowing back into our lives of a spiritual heresy the key to which we have lost.” The breakdown of marriage in contemporary nations “is nothing less than a struggle between two religious traditions,” even if it seems a conflict between traditional religion and ‘secularism.’
The similarities of courtly love to Christian mysticism and its differences from it need more elaboration, which de Rougemont now provides. The “fatal love” of the courtly writers is a form of mysticism; mysticism is not a form of fatal love. Drinking the love potion, Tristan “transgresses the rule of the Pure,” obtaining “his symbolic kiss by force,” unleashing “the powers of evil.” “Tristan is but an adulterated and sometimes ambiguous expression of courtly mysticism,” which seeks not the spiritual marriage seen in Christian marriage, whether of God and Church or of man and wife, but fusion with what transcends life, which turns out to be death. Tristan exhibits knightly pride—danger for its own sake, passion leading to death misinterpreted as self-divinization, whereas genuine Christians exhibit humility in their prudence, their rigor, their clear-sighted obedience to God because Christianity reveals Jesus as God incarnate, God who came down to us, obviating the need for passionate, prideful self-transfigurement. “Passionate love tends to grow like the exaltation of a kind of narcissism,” while Christian love says, “Not my will, but Thine.” “The central event in the world from the standpoint of every kind of religious life that is Christian in content and in form must be the Incarnation. To shift however little from this center involves the double peril of humanism and idealism. The Catharist heresy idealized the whole of the Gospel and treated love in all its forms as a leap out of the created world. The craving for this flight into the divine—or enthusiasm—and for this ultimately impracticable transgression of human limitations, was bound to find expression, and thereby to betray itself fatally, through the magnification in divine terms of sexual love. Conversely, the most ‘Christocentric’ mystics have had a propensity to address God in the language of human feeling—the language of sexual attraction, of hunger and thirst, and of the will. This is a magnification in human terms of the love of God.” A Christian who “die[s] to self” commences “a more real life here below, not the ruin of the world.” He disbelieves the possibility of union with the divine, which “renders human love possible within its own limits.” Thus, “what is the language of human passion according to the heresy corresponds to the language of divine passion”—Christ being the Man of Sorrows, who dies horrifically—in Christianity. “On the far side of trances and askesis, the [Christian] mystic experience culminates in a state of the most thorough ‘disintoxication’ of the soul and of the utmost self-possession. And only then does marriage become possible, meaning as it must, not the employment of eros, but the fecundity of agape.”
True to the Catharist origin pf their beliefs, the devotees of courtly love “did not know that “Darkness is the Anger of God—called forth by our rebellion—and not the work of an obscure demiurge.” “Refusing to be taught by the Light in this life and by means of ‘matter,’ misunderstanding an Agape that sanctifies creatures, and so ignorant of the true nature of what they held to be sin, they ran the risk of being irremediably lost in sin precisely when they thought they were escaping from it” in what was really “an exaltation of narcissism,” an intensity of sentiment, intoxication by passion.
De Rougemont then turns to the history of the courtly love theme in European literature from the Roman de la Rose to Stendhal and finally in Wagnerian opera. This account necessarily addresses the ‘Tocqueville theme’—the move from aristocracy to democracy, from high to mass culture. Throughout the late Middle Ages and into the Protestant Reformation, “the Church of Love was reproduced in countless sects more or less secret and more or less revolutionary,” sects denying “the dogma of the Trinity, at least in its orthodox form,” rejecting both the Roman Catholic Church and the major Protestant churches (“Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli fought these dissenters with the same violence that Rome had employed against its own sectarians”), and upholding “an egalitarian spirit, extending in some cases to complete communism.” The Roman de la Rose itself exhibits the two tendencies, the first part having been written in the ‘idealist’ vein by Guillaume de Lorris and published in 1230, the second written in the ‘realist’ vein by Jean de Meung and published in 1275. De Rougemont traces the influence of the first part to Dante and Rousseau (whose La Nouvelle Héloise, though hardly Christian, does culminate and marriage), the second to the gritty French fabliaux. “Dante is never more passionate than when Philosophy is the theme of his song, unless it is when Philosophy has turned into Holy Science”; he exemplifies the Christianization of the courtly love tradition, as does Petrarch, who moves from the world of courtly love (as in The Triumph of Love) to Christianity and divine forgiveness. Following de Meung, however, “the glorification of wanton indulgence was carried to the same extreme as the glorification of chastity” in the fabliaux, which “heralded the comic novel, which in turn heralded the novel of manners, which heralded the controversial naturalism of much of the fiction of the nineteenth century.” The gauloiserie, the bawdiness, of the fabliaux “expresses an attitude which is simply the inversion of Petrarch’s”; “if chivalry made a mockery of marriage from above, gauloiserie was undermining it from below,” as in the Dit de Chiceface, featuring a monster who feeds only on faithful wives and is consequently reduced to a perpetual condition of emaciation. (Bigorne, Chiceface’s companion, feeds only on submissive husbands and is fat, given their abundance.)
Among the playwrights, in Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare writes the only “courtly tragedy”—fittingly so, as Verona was a center of Catharism in Italy. In the final scene, “death’s consolamentum has sealed the one kind of marriage that Eros was able to wish for.” Corneille “giv[es] battle to the myth” of courtly love”: His “originality lies in having sought to attack and deny this passion by which he was sustained,” attempting “to preserve at least the principle of freedom…without however sacrificing to it the delightful and tormenting effects of the irresistible ‘love potion’—here metaphorical,” and making “the wish to be free a highly effective instrument of the passion which it claimed to cure.” While exhibiting “a rather morbid acceptance of the defeat of mind and of the resignation of the senses,” Racine in his Phèdre brings the myth “up into the light,” making passion “finally succumb to the Norm of Light.” But not in the manner of Thomas Aquinas or of Dante, since Racine embraced Jansenist Catholicism, “a religion of retreat—perhaps the final insult to intolerable day.” The trace of troubadourism remains.
The advance of rationalism and of rationalist Christianity in the seventeenth century brought on a temporary “eclipse of the myth.” Marriage made a comeback and “emotion was imprisoned in the showy contrivances of the classical baroque.” Many writers replaced “the separation of mind from believing soul” with “the distinction between mind and body.” With “intelligence and sex” now considered the principal division within human beings, passion could have no elevation, real or imagined. “It became the fashion to talk of passionettes or little passions,” since the passions had been belittled. However powerful the passion of Don Juan (first seen in Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster in 1630, then in Molière’s Don Juan in 1665), it is a low, a sensual passion. Don Juan “is the demon of unalloyed immanence, a prisoner of worldly appearances, and the martyr of a more and more deceptive and despicable sensation,” unlike Tristan, “the prisoner of a realm lying beyond night and day and the martyr of a rapture which is transformed at death into unalloyed bliss.” Tristan’s sword is the sword of a knight, Don Juan’s sword only a phallic symbol. “Amid so much pliancy, so much intellectual and sensual refinement, so much satiation, one most profound human need was left unsatisfied—the need of suffering.” This need was fulfilled, but now in the lowest way, by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, a soul in the grip of “dialectical frenzy.” “Only murder can destroy freedom, and it must be the murder of the beloved, inasmuch as loving is what fetters us.”
With the French Revolution, its Terror, and the wars subsequent to it, suffering returned. With German Romanticism, “for the first time, the worship of Darkness and of Death rose up into the field of lyrical awareness,” as poets revived the Tristan themes. German Romanticism wavers between enthusiasm and “metaphysical melancholy,” analogous to the Manichaean dialectic of day and night. Gradually, the metaphysical element declined, as “the myth became progressively more thoroughly internal” and “all vestiges of a ‘sacred’ element vanished from social life.” This gets into the European novels that appeared soon after, especially those of Stendhal, who writes in the ‘realist’ line. His hero returns “to a state in which the beloved will be viewed as she actually is,” and the way back to reality is low: “the antidote to the love potion is inconstancy,” a plot in which tragedy turns into farce. For the realists, passion is merely an error, as there can be no grandeur in materialism. In lesser novelists (Alexandre Dumas, Henri Bataille) the myth is popularized in an “attempt to normalize passion for the middle class.” The King Mark figure is only a cuckold, Tristan only a gigolo, Iseult only an “idle, dissatisfied wife who reads novels.” This is “the idealization of tame desires.”
Wagner resists all of this. “He understood that [passion] is one of the fundamental decisions open to a human being, a choice exercised in favor of Death if Death is release from a world under the sway of evil.” The “religion of passion” is essentially lyrical, better expressed not in words but in music. It is operatic. Wagnerianism takes a sinister form when introduced to mass, democratized politics, with Fascism and Communism, aiming to “deify the here-below.” Whether in literature or in politics, passion responds to “the need of idealization which the human mind had acquired from a mystical understanding first condemned, then lost.” “Politics, the class war, national feeling—everything nowadays is an excuse for ‘passion’ and is already being magnified into this or that ‘mystic doctrine”” in a return “to the age of abduction and rape.” The ancients used warlike metaphors to describe “the effects of natural love,” but the tactics of war and the ways of lovers were not linked; different rules prevailed. In the twelfth century, this changed, as erotic language became those of possession and surrender, the rules of chivalry prevailing in both war and love. “At no other time has an ars amandi given birth to an ars bellandi.” But now, just as “the detailed formality of war was devised to check the violent impulses of feudal blood,” aristocratic thumos, “the cult of chastity among the troubadours was intended to check erotic excitement.” By contrast, Renaissance Italian princes preferred to buy the enemy’s army, not to fight it (a trend Machiavelli deplored), and preferred to buy love, too, as courtesans became respectable citizens (this, Machiavelli somehow neglected to deplore). The cannons and common soldiers of France under the command of King Charles conquered Italy, in an early demonstration of the power of centralized monarchy and democratized society against the aristocrats, but modern European warriors still retained a certain formality. War became chess-like, deaths again minimized in “the supreme achievement of a civilization whose whole aim was the regulation and ordering of Nature, matter, and the determinism of both, according to the laws of human reason and of personal benefit.” This “may have been an illusory aim, but without it no civilization and no culture are possible.” Neoclassical Europe refused “to see any nobility in disaster,” placing “the greatness of man in his ability to limit” the effect of war and passion “and to make them serve other ends.” Even the libertines of the eighteenth century preferred “crafty diplomacy” to fighting, as they “did not intend to jeopardize the refinements of life.” Talleyrand comes to mind, but de Rougemont is thinking of the Marshal de Saxe, who insisted that “a good general can make war all his life” without ever fighting a battle, and the Scots financier in Louis XV’s court, suggested buying the enemy’s artillery instead of waging a war.
The French revolutionaries changed that. Regicide meant that passion had returned, perhaps as a deformation of Rousseau; “the violence that had long been pinned down by the classical formality of warfare became once again something at once horrifying and alluring.” This “cult and blood-spilling mystery…gave rise to a new form of community—the Nation,” which, in the already existing spirit of democracy, must be “translated to the level of the people as a whole” in the characteristically passionate form of narcissism, now a collective self-love. “Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things, as solitary and powerful as God,” unknowingly making death its object. “Napoleon was the first to take the passion factor into account each time he gave battle,” invoking “the passionate might of the Nation” in his rhetoric. Although Chateaubriand has strong affinities with the Romantics, he remained enough of a neoclassicist, and became enough of a Christian, to oppose Napoleon. [5] The German Romantics were not so moderate, even as they, as nationalists, sided with their rulers in Prussia against Napoleon’s armies. “And the essentially passionate philosophies of thinkers like Fichte and Hegel” reinforced nationalism, as well. As a secular religion, nationalism ensured that “it was no longer rival interests that came into conflict, but antagonistic ‘religions'” and, “unlike interests, religions do not compromise,” making religious and quasi-religious wars “by far the most violent.”
The Battle of Verdun, a century later, changed the face of war yet again, aiming not at conquest but destruction, thanks to new military technologies that dealt death “from afar.” This “has no equivalent in any imaginable code of love,” which assumes or at least aspires to intimate knowledge of the other. “Total war eludes both man and instinct; it turns upon passion, its begetter.” Politics of nationalism and party became the only conduit for passion, as “the masses respond to the dictator in a particular country in the same way as the women of that country respond to the tactics of suitors.” In Mein Kampf, Hitler understands the crowds in front of him as essentially feminine, himself as their seducer-master. De Rougemont predicts that in modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism’ ruling institutions will eventually fail because the gulf between those institutions and the everyday lives of individuals will become too great, and the binding force of the ‘charismatic’ lover-leader will weaken, as one such tyrant follows another. Without any real morality or culture, the regime will weaken and collapse.
In the liberal regimes, it is marriage that is in crisis. As Montaigne demonstrates, modern life centers on individuality and, as a result, individual choice has been made the new basis for marriage. It is not a sound basis. The “middle class morals” of today, devitalized elements of what was once a living faith, along with “romantic morals” or passion, a “profaned and therefore distorted” version of courtly love, threaten the foundation of civil-social order. Marriage had been founded on three conditions: rituals or “sacred compulsions”; community moeurs; and religious doctrine, especially the promise of eternity. “Passion and marriage are essentially irreconcilable,” and in the contemporary West “the dream of potential passion acts as a perpetual distraction to paralyze the revulsions of boredom.” Madame Bovary doesn’t understand that “passion is a woe,” not a relief, and she is not the only one who doesn’t understand that. Indeed, “passion wrecks the very notion of marriage at a time when there is being attempted the feat of trying to ground marriage in values elaborated by the morals of passion.” Whereas “earlier victims of the myth” could “throw off its spell” by “escaping out of the finite world,” now “a passion calling itself ‘irresistible’ (as an alibi for the discharge of responsibility) cannot even discover how to be called faithful, since its end is no longer transcendence” and the phrase ’till death do us part’ therefore makes no sense to those who mouth it. “To be faithful is to have decided to accept another being for his or her own sake, in his or her own limitations and reality choosing this being not as an excuse for excited elevation or as an ‘object of contemplation,’ but as having a matchless and independent life which requires active love,” since “any man opposed to compromise is inconsistent in marrying.” That is, the mutual ruling and being-ruled of a husband and wife teaches the mutual ruling and being ruled of politics. [6]. Nations being nations and regimes being regime, contemporary tyrants, having no use for genuine politics, ruling according to their own passions and by fomenting passion in their subjects, have attacked sexual libertinism not by reviving religion but with collectivism, re-branding it as a producer of future soldiers. “Like passion, the taste for war follows on a notion that life should be ardent, a notion which is a mask of a wish for death.”
“First and last, at the beginning and the end of passion, there is no ‘delusion’ about man or about God—and a forteriori no moral delusion—but a crucial decision: a man wishes to be his own god.” Reasoning cannot cure this, and appeals to the realities of life are worthless, since they are what the passionate man condemns. “Such a man’s passion can be overcome only by killing him before he can kill himself, and in some other way than he wishes to die.” If by bodily nature human beings are polygamous, if human imagination attempts to elevate us beyond life in a passionate embrace of death, in married love “the self rises into being a person—beyond its own happiness.” “That shows how different are the meanings of the word ‘to love’ in the world of Eros and in the world of Agape.” Agapic love is commanded, not spontaneous, active not passive: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Not even God can “demand of a man a state of sentiment,” but He can demand actions. Otherwise, “the imperative, ‘Be in love! would be devoid of meaning; or, if it could be obeyed, would deprive a man of his freedom.” Agape “is the expression of being in action.” With Christianity, “salvation is no longer something beyond, and ever a little more out of reach during the indeterminable ascent of Desire, the consumer of life; it is here below and is attainable through obedience to the Word.” The “idealistic askesis” of unChristian love is what “Nietzsche unjustly lays at the door of Christianity.” But if animated by agapic love, a husband’s “dearest wish is for the other’s good.” Marriage is “the institution in which passion is ‘contained,’ not by morals, but by love.” Marriage does not simply negate passion, which would be impossible; it limits passion, enables marriages to endure after passion weakens.
“All of my morals, my passion, and my politics derive from the composition and tension of opposites,” the concordia discors of the cosmos itself, as created by God. Without that concordia, with the attempt to reduce a theme to a single beat, human beings succumb to the modern form of tyranny, ‘totalitarianism’ by destroying in their own lives “the existence of essential Love.”
Notes
- “Courtly love” is itself a term invented by the Romantics of the nineteenth century, but the thing itself originated in the high Middle Ages.
- This is why the love potion acts like a drug, exerting a power that is “solipsistic, narcissistic, and segregative,” just as passion is. “Their passion does not touch the reality of the Other but loves only its own image”—which is “why marriage cannot be based on passion.”
- One may doubt that de Rougemont is quite fair to Plato and his Socrates, since the philosophic eros, in one sense zetetic or perpetually questing, and questioning, engages fellow human beings in the quest for noēsis, however incomplete or tentative the noetic experience will be. By knowing that they do not know, philosophers tacitly acknowledge that only a God who grants insight into Himself by grace could fully satisfy their quest.
- De Rougemont views the Franciscans with some suspicion, too, considering them spiritual knights-errant. “The rhetoric of the troubadours and of the courtly romances was the direct inspiration of the Franciscan poetic impulse.” St. Theresa of Avila, who “doted upon” the romances of chivalry in her girlhood, also “employs and even refines upon courtly rhetoric.” “What an extraordinary return and incorporation of heresy by means of a rhetoric devised by heretics for use against the Church, and which the Church, thanks to the saints, eventually wrested from them!”
- See “Chateaubriand Against Napoleon,” on this website under “Nations.”
- “Inasmuch as when taken one by one most human beings of both sexes are either rogues or neurotics, why should they turn into angels the moment they are paired?” This is why stability in marriage requires belief in God, the eternal; only with such belief can one attempt to “live perfectly in imperfection”—a “sober folly that rather closely simulates behaving sensibly; that is neither heroic nor challenging, but a patient and fond application,” “a pledge given for this world.” “Fidelity secures itself against unfaithfulness by becoming accustomed not to separate desire from love. For if desire travels, swiftly and anywhere, love is slow and difficult; love actually does pledge one for the rest of one’s life, and it exacts nothing less than this pledge in order to disclose its real nature. That is why a man who believes in marriage can no longer believe seriously in ‘love at first sight,’ still less in the ‘irresistible’ nature of passion.”
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