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

1. “Courtly love” is itself a term invented by the Romantics of the nineteenth century, but the thing itself originated in the high Middle Ages.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. 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!”
5.  See “Chateaubriand Against Napoleon,” on this website under “Nations.”
6. “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.”

 

François René de Chateaubriand: Vie de Rancé. Printed in Monsee, Illinois, 2020.

 

No less than his younger cousin, Alexis de Tocqueville, Chateaubriand long considered the condition of his fellow aristocrats in France, and in the world generally. In his novella, The Last of the Abencerrajes, he presented a way in which fervently religious aristocrats of different faiths might yet reach a modus vivendi with one another. [1] In Vie de Rancé, he shows how a young aristocratic wastrel might reform himself, enter the Church, and eventually reform a declining monastic order as “the perfect model of penitence,” “the worthy son and faithful imitator of the great St Bernard,” that eloquent and austere adherent of the Benedictine Rule, co-founder of the Cistercian Order and the Knights Templar. 

Born in 1626, Armand Jean le Bouthillier de Rancé’s aristocratic heritage could hardly be questioned. His father, Denis Bouthillier, Lord of Rancé in Brittainy served as a Councilor of State under Louis XIII; Cardinal Richelieu was the son’s godfather. But 1626 was also the year of the Chalais Conspiracy, in which aristocrats plotted against the lives of Louis and Richelieu; later schemes, culminating in France’s civil war, the Fronde, would involve the younger Rancé, two decades later. He received an education in Greek, Latin, and “Moeurs”—the “traditions of education that go back to Montaigne.” Montaigne, that most elegant and understated of Machiavelli’s followers: What moeurs did the boy learn? In reading “the poets of Greece and Rome,” with their “ancient ideas,” he imbibed “a subtle passion hidden beneath the flowers” of Anacreon’s erotic lyrical poetry and drinking songs, some of which he translated and published. Being the second son in an aristocratic household, Armand was destined for a clerical career, becoming the commendatory abbot of the monastery at La Trappe at the age of ten, then ordained as a priest at age twenty-five. [2] For him, understandably and characteristically for a man of his circumstance in the France of his time, he regarded the Church as a ladder of ambition; he had no financial worries, as he inherited substantial wealth from his father, who died in the following year.

As a youth, Rancé “wandered in the midst of the societies which began before the Fronde”—that is, the salons presided over by literary ladies, places of refinement, of amours, and often of aristocratic resistance to the monarchy. Salon life engendered Les Précieuses, who pitted the refined language of the aristocracy against what the ladies regarded as the vulgarity of the royal court. The salons had considerable social influence and eventual political consequence. “There, under the influence of women, the mixture of society began, by the fusion of ranks, this intellectual equality, the inimitable moeurs of our old patrie were formed. The politeness of spirit joined to the politeness of manners: they knew how to live well and to speak well.” That is, the aristocrats themselves, striving for authority in matters of taste, needed to introduce brilliant young non-aristocrats to their homes—an early trace of democratization which had lasting consequences. An Italian lady, Catherine de Vivonne, married to the Marquise de Rambouillet, ruled one of the most influential of these societies; “from the debris of this society was formed a multitude of other societies which preserved the defects of the Hôtel de Rambouillet without its qualities.” Among them, for example, was the salon organized by Anne de L’Enclos, nicknamed ‘Ninon,’ a courtesan and author, patron of Molière and of the child, François-Marie Arouet, later ‘Voltaire.’ She, too, sympathized with the Frondists. [3] Rancé frequented several of these societies; “he could not spoil his mind, but he spoiled his morals.” It was in one of them that he met Marie d’Avaugour, Duchesse de Montbazon, his future mistress.

Politically, then the salons were “friends of the Fronde” and thus enemies of the king. Rancé’s association with them raised the suspicions of Richelieu’s successor, Cardinal Mazarin. Chateaubriand blames Mazarin for sparking the civil war, which began in 1648; he raised taxes and fines in order to fund the ongoing war with the Hapsburgs, much to the displeasure of the aristocrats. Mazarin and the Queen feared some of the more formidable aristocrats, especially Louis II de Bourbon, Prince of Condé, called ‘Le Grand Condé’ in recognition of his brilliant generalship during that war. While the prince suppressed the first manifestation of the Fronde, he switched sides in the second, putting the monarchy at risk. Madame de Montbazon, married to the much older Hercule de Rohan, governor of Paris, was an enemy of Mazarin, pro-Frondist, and reputed to be an avaricious libertine. “It is easy to imagine that Madame de Montbazon would take a new lover, whose treasure would tempt her beautiful and unfaithful hands.” It is equally easy to imagine how the young Rancé might have been dazzled by her; they became partners in political intrigue, with Madame as the decidedly senior partner. Chateaubriand can only shake his head: “When you stir up these memories that are turning to dust what would you get from them but a new proof of the nothingness of man? These are the finished games that ghosts retrace in cemeteries before the first hour of day.” 

All of this ended in 1657 with her death at the age of forty-seven, which Rancé learned of in a grotesque scene. Not having heard of her sudden passing, he came to the Duchess’s home, “where he was allowed to enter at any hour.” “Instead of the sweets he thought he was going to enjoy, he saw a coffin which he judged to be that of his mistress, noticing her bloody head, which had by chance fallen from under the sheet with which she had been covered with great negligence, and which had been detached from the rest of the body” in order “to avoid making a new coffin longer than the one they had been using.” [4] The shock brought him to his knees; Rancé later testified that he “was astonished that his soul was not separated from his body.” He experienced a “Christian vision”: a “lake of fire in which a woman was devoured by the flames.” Repenting, he converted to serious Christianity and set out to reform the Trappist Order, exchanging “the lightness of his first life” for “the severity of his second life.” One story has it that Rancé had Madame’s head preserved, keeping it in his cell at the abbey as a memento mori for himself and for future generations of monks. Chateaubriand graciously doubts the tale. “The annals of mankind are composed of many fables mixed with some truths” in “the mirage of history.” He does not, however, doubt that Rancé wrote, “I have miscalculated, I will do penance for it all my life.” [5]

“Under Louis XIV, liberty was nothing more than the despotism of the laws, above which the inviolable arbitrariness rose as regulator. This slave liberty had some advantages: what was lost to Frenchmen at home was gained abroad in domination: the Frenchman was chained, France free,” free from foreign domination thanks to its hegemony on the European continent. At the abbey, Rancé sought to establish “the Christian Sparta.” Penitence and austerity freed the monks from sin, insofar as human beings can be freed from it. He also imported a Christian version of the egalitarianism seen in the salons, inasmuch as in the abbey “Man was esteemed whatever his condition: the poor man was weighed with the rich by the weight of the sanctuary,” by his conformity to the regime of the Christian Sparta, a regime of Christian liberty. Chateaubriand lauds him as “the immortal compatriot of whom I would weep in bitter tears at anything that could separate us on the last shore.”

“Here begins the new life of Rancé: we enter into the region of profound silence.” And not only for himself and the monks under his tutelage: “Through Rancé, the century of Louis XIV entered into solitude, and solitude was established in the bosom of the world.” Not only political France but religious France was torn by factions: the Jansenists, for whom divine grace negates free will; the Jesuits, evangelical soldiers of God; the Ultramontanists, advocates of papal power over the monarchic regime of the centralized state. Among all these, the Cistercians at La Trappe, guided by Rancé, lived in peace.

Not without controversy, however, outside the bounds of the abbey: “The calumnies published against the monastery of La Trappe by the libertines, who laughed at austerities, and by the jealous, who felt that another immortality was emerging for Rancé, began to increase; the first errors of the solitary man were constantly brought before their eyes, and they persisted in seeing in his conversion only motives of vanity.” As another abbot told him, “You have many admirers, but few imitators.” Rancé replied to such objections, “God has not commanded all men to leave the world, but there is none whom he has not forbidden to love the world.” The Church had become too worldly, owing to her very success in fulfilling Jesus’ Great Commission. “Like a mother who is too fecund, [the Church] began to weaken herself by the new number of her children. The persecutions having ceased, fervor and faith diminished in repose. However, God, who wished to maintain His Church, preserved some people who separated themselves from their possessions and from their families by a voluntary death, which was no less real, no less holy, no less miraculous than that of the first martyrs.” With these words, Rancé addressed the challenge modernity (and especially, by Chateaubriand’s time, modern liberalism) posed to the Church, the challenge of religious toleration. Toleration can kill Christian fidelity not with kindness but with indifference. While the Jacobins burned churches and abbeys, while Napoleonic Wars drove the Trappists drove the Trappists to America (“it was a great spectacle that the world and solitude fled as one before Bonaparte”), the blood of the martyrs remained the seed of the Church. But when the most faithful Christians are met with benign neglect, when they are simply ignored, they may rest in complacency, become lax not only in their efforts at evangelism but in their own spiritual lives. The abbey of La Trappe preserved Christian witness in what would come to be called an increasingly ‘secularized’ world.

In reacting against his own previous way of life, in his rigorous reforms of the Order, did he merely rush from one extreme to another? Chateaubriand denies it. “Rancé would be a man to be driven out of the human race if he had not shared and overshadowed the rigors he imposed on others: but what can one say to a man who responds with forty years of desert, who shows you his ulcerated limbs, who, far from complaining, increases in resignation in proportion as he increases in pain,” a man who, “in the midst of all these tribulations had taken no refuge other than Christian patience”? Far from the spirit of its grim ancient model, “the family of religion around Rancé,” the citizens of the Christian Sparta, “had the tenderness of the natural family and something more; the child she was going to lose was the child she was going to find again: she was ignorant of that despair which is finally extinguished before the irreparability of the loss. Faith prevents friendship from dying; each one weeping aspires to the happiness of the Christian, called by God; we see a pious jealousy burst forth around the righteous, which has the ardor of envy, without having the torment of it.” On his deathbed, Rancé could say to a weeping religieuse, “I do not leave you, I precede you.” “His heart was at rest, and the divine Spirit had filled his soul with splendor.” Saint-Simon recalls, “The Church wept for him and even the world rendered him justice.” [6]

Chateaubriand ends by contrasting the Christian Sparta with the original one. One important element of the Spartan regime was the crypteia, a legal requirement that young aristocrats be formed into bands, the cryptai, charged with killing and terrorizing the helots in the countryside. This institution not only subordinated slaves not under the immediate rule of masters in the urban center of the polis, it hardened the cryptai, forcing them to endure harsh weather and putting them into constant, arduous action as hunters of men. Having endured this, they could then enter into full Spartan citizenship. Clemenceau writes, “The cryptia of Sparta was the pursuit and death of slaves; the cryptia of La Trappe is the pursuit and death of the passions. This phenomenon s in our midst, and we do not notice it.” Owing perhaps to the enduring spirit of Montaigne, “the institutions of Rancé seem to us only an object of curiosity which we will see in passing.” His Life of Rancé stands as his own attempt to engage modern Christians, if not to join the Christian Sparta, then to undertake the stern, loving, rewarding task of making war against the worst elements of the human soul.

 

Notes

1. See “Religious Toleration Among the Aristocrats? Chateaubriand’s Thought Experiment” on this website under the category “Manners and Morals.”
2. A commendatory abbot holds an abbey in commendam, that is, he derives revenues from the abbey but exercises only limited authority over the life of the monks and is often a placeholder until a more suitable officeholder is designated. As a result, a layman (such as the child, Rancé) may become a commendatory abbot.
3. Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675-1755), chronicler of the French court, laments “the disorder she caused among the highest and most brilliant youth.” “Ninon never had but one lover at a time,” although she retained a coterie of numerous “admirers.” As she aged, the lovers dropped away, but she remained influential, prized for her great wit. (Duke of Saint-Simon: Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency. Bayle St. John translation. Washington: M. Water Dunne, Publisher, 1901, Volume I, 343-344.) Saint-Simon himself spares no affection for Mazarin: “What I considered the most important thing to be done, was to overthrow the system of government in which Cardinal Mazarin had imprisoned the King and the realm. A foreigner [Mazarin was an Italian], risen from the dregs of the people, who thinks of nothing but his own power and his own greatness, cares nothing for the State, except in its relations to himself. He despises its laws, its genius, its advantages: he is ignorant of its rules and its forms; he thinks only of subjugating all, of confounding all, of bringing all down to one level. Richelieu and his successor, Mazarin, succeeded so well in this policy that the nobility, be degrees, became annihilated, as we now see them.” That is, in Saint-Simon’s estimation, France’s apparently ‘absolutist’ monarchy in fact became an oligarchy of ‘intellectuals’ and clergymen, many of them of low birth. “Now things have reached such a pretty pass that the greatest lord is without power, and in a thousand different manners is dependent upon the meanest plebeian. It is in this manner that things hasten from one extreme to the other.” (II.341). Accordingly, had Saint-Simon reached the impossibly long age of 110, he might well have ascribed the French Revolution to the effects of the Richelieu-Mazarin regime.
4. Unlike Chateaubriand, Saint-Simon regards this story as fiction.
5. The term “miscalculated” evidently reminds Chateaubriand of the “wager” made by the most eminent mathematicians of Rancé’s time: “The terrible Pascal, haunted by his esprit géometrique, doubted incessantly; he could not escape his misfortune unless he rushed into faith.”
6. Saint-Simon, op. cit., I.191. He also remarks that Rancé’s chosen successor at the abbey, D. François Gervaise, who “acted as if he were already master” before the elderly Rancé died, “brought disorder and ill-feeling to the monastery,” and was eventually caught in an illicit love affair, after which he resigned and departed (I.149).

 

 

Robert G. Hunter: Shakespeare and the Mystery of God’s Judgments. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1976.

 

Hunter begins, winningly, by admitting, “This book presents a hypothesis which it does not try to prove.” This turns out to be very much how he understands Shakespeare’s own thoughts about God, except that Shakespeare presents multiple hypotheses. His Shakespeare is Socratic-zetetic.

The unproven hypothesis is that one cause for the Elizabethans’ ability “to write great tragedy was the impact on their minds of some of the more striking ideas of the Protestant Reformation.” If our minds are not free but divinely determined, and if most of us “will spend our eternities in hell,” as ordained by all-mighty God, then Elizabethan England, not Nietzsche’s Germany, is where tragedy begins in the modern world—and much to anti-Christ Nietzsche’s dismay, that would be. Pity and terror as a response to what Montaigne calls the human condition make sense, once the Christian Aristotelianism of the Roman Catholic Church loses its hold on many Christian minds. This “new concept of the human condition and the divine nature…to say the least, takes some thinking about.”

Roman Catholics understood the questions raised by the Biblical teachings of human blameworthiness and divine predestination, but the authors of the miracle and mystery plays tended not to emphasize them. In Robert Le Dyable, produced in 1375 in Paris, the son of the Duke of Normandy goes on a spree of theft, rape and murder. The reason for this seemingly inexplicable run of horrendous crimes becomes clear when his mother confesses that she had conceived her son only after praying to the Devil, having been childless and apparently barren. Robert repents of his sins but must endure a series of humiliating trials. Finally relenting, God intervenes and rewards Robert with the emperor’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Robert shows his gratitude by fighting off God’s enemies, the invading pagans, having gone from being the enemy of Christ to being the fool of Christ to being not solely a type of Christ but “the champion of Christ.”

The unknown author “presents his audience with a traditional Christian vision of the world that makes human life comprehensible and bearable without seriously cheating—without, that is, excluding sin, cruelty, and evil from the elements that go to make the artifact,” the play. As in all miracle plays, God, the Virgin Mary, and the angels watch the play from stage right, intervening when and as they see fit. “The world of that play is for its God a theater of his own creation in which he is both spectator and participant,” ensuring “that his will is done by making that will unmistakably clear to his creatures.” When human wills clash with God’s will, or human wills clash with each other, God eventually, miraculously, sets things right. He must, if his creatures are to be redeemed from the curse of Adam. Even Robert, who suffers “a very severe case of original sin,” can be redeemed, if he willingly invites God’s grace. In that invitation, Robert also wills himself to undertake an imitatio Christi, a “buffeting” that parallels Jesus’ suffering, preparatory to his own worldly ‘ascension’ to the imperial throne.

Robert Le Dyable takes place “in a comprehensible world, a version of our world that has been made to make sense,” a tale told not by an idiot but by a playwright guided by the revelations of an all-wise Creator-God. “But the clarity is of that sort that is achieved by concealing difficulties.” Although “the unaided human intellect” may convince itself that Biblical revelation is true, “it is not possible for the human will to move unaided from that conviction to any sanctifying action, such as that of true contrition.” For that, man needs divine grace; “the heartfelt desire for God’s grace must be preceded by God’s grace,” by prevenient grace. That need “is left out of Robert’s conversion.” To include it, however, would call into question Robert’s, indeed man’s, free will. The audience would become “spectators at a cosmic puppet show in which the human actors were rewarded for responding to a jerk of their strings.” This would point them to a dilemma, as “it is not given to most of us to understand how the human will can be said to be free when it cannot act for its own good unless impelled to do so by a supernatural force.” Yet if the human will is not free, why does God punish those who disobey Him? This is what Hunter calls “the mystery of God’s judgment.”

Several responses have been offered. One is “the heresy, or semiheresy, called semi-Pelagianism,” which “find[s] in human will and nature more health and strength” than the doctrine of prevenient grace admits. [1] This appears to be consistent with Paul’s understanding in First Timothy 2:4: God “wills that all men shall be saved, and come unto the knowledge of the truth.” Augustine denies this, contending that human beings can freely accept God’s offer of grace but cannot initiate their own salvation. “All men” means “all the predestined,” only, “because every type of man is among them.” “All” means “some of each kind.” But the great Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, go still further, denying to human beings any genuine free will at all. Yet this “reveals or creates another mystery: how can God be just if he punishes throughout eternity creatures who are without free will?” With this mystery, Christian tragedy becomes possible. Human life is no longer a divine comedy. “Never, before the sixteenth century, so far as I know, are we shown a dramatic protagonist being hauled off to hell, like Dr. Faustus, or Don Juan, because he has not achieved repentance for his sins.” Further, if human beings are rational creatures, they could readily be taught to avoid such a doom. But if “what our minds contain that is not of our conscious minds,” and “may be the voice of internal grace or of the temptings which God permits the powers of evil to visit us with,” where does that leave us, except in a condition of terror and pity, witnesses to the unknowable consequences of our own tragic flaw?

“Robert sins out of passion,” impelled “by the diabolical forces that are a part of his fallen human nature.” In the French poet Rutebeuf’s Théophile, drawing upon the legend of Theophilus of Adana, audiences saw not rejection of God out of passion but “rejection of God through malice, the deliberate, willed choices of the forces of evil over the forces of good,” a “pact with the Devil” anticipating Faustus. Théophile has been unjustly removed from an episcopate by a new bishop and blames God, not the ‘fallen’ nature of the bishop. Tempted by “Salatin” to renounce God and worship the devil, he regains his position and acts tyrannically, ceasing only after he repents, prays to the Virgin Mary, who graciously intervenes on his behalf. Like Robert, the repentant Théophile avails himself of divine grace, but his sin is “far more heinous than Robert’s rapes and murders,” as he has committed “the most terrible of all Christian sins, the sin against the Holy Ghost.” That sin, mentioned but undefined in the New Testament, might mean any number of things; as usual, Thomas Aquinas provides a comprehensive list. It might mean blaspheming against the Holy Spirit; it might mean (as Augustine argues) “final impenitence, when “a man perseveres in mortal sin until death”; or it might mean “a sin committed against that good which is appropriated to the Holy Ghost.” Aquinas explains that power is appropriated to God the Father; to sin against the Father is to sin through weakness. Wisdom is appropriated to God the Son; to sin against the Son is to sin through ignorance (as in “Father, forgive them, for the know not what they do”). But because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Ghost, malice, “the very choosing of evil,” is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Hence John Milton’s Satan: “Evil, be thou my Good.” That is, preeminently, the sin Théophile commits. 

The New Testament authors leave little doubt that the sin against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable, irredeemable. [2] But Aquinas demurs, claiming that the apostles’ strictures do not “close the way of forgiveness and healing to an all-powerful and merciful God, who, sometimes, by a miracle, so to speak, restores spiritual health to such men.” The sin, he goes on to say, is unpardonable “considered in itself,” without divine intervention, but “God can pardon it”—a “mystery of God’s judgment,” indeed, if a most welcome one. Calvin will have none of this, however. Finding it “easy to identify the sin against the Holy Ghost”—it is apostasy, “the turning away from God by men who know the truth but reject it”—he considers all apostates to be “reprobate” and, moreover, predestined to be such from before they were born. God predestines many human beings to be reprobates so that they may “serve as vessels for his wrath.” But although they serve a useful and indeed divine purpose, “there is no forgiveness” for reprobates “in this world or the next.”

As evidence, Hunter cites Nathaniel Woodes’s play, The Conflict of Conscience. The Conflict “is a thoroughly bad tragedy, but it is a tragedy,” not a miracle play. It begins with Philologus, a Calvinist who, “true to his name, waxes eloquent” about how God “sends tribulations in order to preserve men from complacency, to make them abjure their sins, to prove their constancy, but also, and rather ominously, simply in order to display his power.” Like Job, Philologus himself is wealthy with “many friends and a wife and children of whom he is very fond.” He is also to be tested. Caught by the forces of the Inquisition, he forsakes God, proving (above all) to himself that he is among the reprobate, and therefore can do nothing to avoid damnation. “Man’s will, in the world of [this] Reformation play, far from being of paramount importance, is shown to be absolutely dependent upon God’s will,” against which “there is no arguing and no appeal” because it is “beyond the reach of human reason.” Philologus’s “knuckling under to the papacy is a Calvinist equivalent to signing a pact with the Devil,” inasmuch as “the servants of the pope are in fact the servants of the Devil” and to recant at their demand is to commit “the sin against the Holy Ghost.” Whereas Théophile was “free to revoke his original choice and does so,” Philologus cannot, convinced of the prevenience of divine grace.

“Both Luther,” especially in his polemic against Erasmus, “and Calvin see men not simply as losing free will, but as never possessing it, and Calvin in particular stresses that man’s radical lack of freedom is the result of God’s will—a will that has determined, in eternity, what the eternal fate of every man will be.” While Protestant Reformers concurred with the Roman Catholic teaching that the election of a human soul to the state of grace is entirely unmerited by any supposed virtue that a soul may think it possesses, Catholics do not claim that any soul is “predestined to go to hell.” “It is a terrible decree,” Calvin writes, “yet no man shall be able to deny, but that God foreknew what end man should have ere he created him, and therefore foreknew it because he had so ordained by his decree.” And this is just, since “the pure will of God alone…is the supreme rule of justice.” For his part, Luther readily admits that human beings cannot now but call such decrees unjust by the light of nature and even by the light of grace, but we will “one day” call them just by “the light of glory”—that is, when we enter Heaven and God’s justice, “incomprehensible” to us on earth, will be seen by us as “evident.” In the meantime, Luther and Calvin agree, it is only for us to fear God.

In our fear, one is likely to ask, ‘Am I saved?’ “Nowhere was such uncertainty more likely than in England,” which was no longer Catholic but not Lutheran or Calvinist, either. The Anglican Church kept a careful silence on the matter of the existence of free will, saying only that “God’s prevenient grace makes it possible for us to have a good will.” Under the circumstances, “the fact that you cannot choose to be one of the elect makes it a matter of desperate necessity to convince yourself that you are,” and mere good works don’t tell, one way or the other. In the case of Philologus, a second ending was written for the play in which he repents and is saved, thanks to God’s graceful intervention. “Blessed are the dramatists, for they shall play God.” In Calvinist terms, he must not have been a reprobate, after all; God was only having His way with him, now very much to the relief of audiences.

Turning to a more impressive tragedian, Hunter considers Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Although the Anglican Church’s 39 Articles of Faith “had been devised so carefully that both Calvinists and ‘Augustinians’ could safely subscribe to them”—dealing with the conflict between prevenient grace and free will “by disregarding it,” by the 1590s the Calvinists had become restive, insisting on clarifying the matter by issuing the Lambeth Articles, which would have amended the Articles of Faith by asserting predestination in terms that could not be misunderstood. Queen Elizabeth was not amused; alarmed by “the threat to theological peace and quiet inevitably caused by an insistence upon absolute clarity,” perhaps concerned, with her chief adviser and Lord Privy Seal, Robert Cecil, that those convinced of predestination and their own reprobation might become “desperate in their wickedness,” and quite likely foreseeing the possibility of a civil war of religion in her realm, Elizabeth refused to authorize the amendments. Marlowe, who was trained as a theologian, would have understood the matter at issue. In Dr. Faustus, “playing upon the doubts aroused by religious controversy, he is able to leave his audience confronted with a terrible mystery at the end of a tragic experience whose intensity is increased by the fact that its creator has manufactured it out of the religious beliefs and doubts of the men and women watching it,” “draw[ing] upon the full spectrum of Christian belief in his time.” 

Faustus is bored, “bored with life and bored, above all, with scholarship,” being himself a theologian. Patching together a number of New Testament quotes yet leaving out “Christ’s atonement for the sins of humanity,” he summarizes Christian doctrine as nothing more than “Che sera, sera.” What in the New Testament is a “psychomachy,” a struggle within each human soul between divine and demonic spirits, becomes “sciamachy—a battle of shadows.” All the world is indeed a stage, and we poor players mouth lines dictated to us in advance, “repeat[ing] a script we do not remember having learned.” Marlowe illustrates the shadow-world Faustus has conceived for himself by having him turn to magic, to the unreal. That is, he turns to the desperate wickedness Elizabeth’s counsellor anticipated. Semi-Pelagians in the audience will wonder if Faustus will “find within himself the strength to turn to God”; Augustinians will wonder “if Faustus will be given the grace to accept grace”; Calvinists will become increasingly convinced of his reprobation. Those not firmly attached to any of these doctrines will be hurled into a condition of pity, terror, and doubt, since “the strategy of the play is to terrify its audience, not to comfort it,” as seen in Faustus’ excruciating admission, “I do repent, and yet I do despair.” The play “force[s] the believing Christians of the Elizabethan era to face the full reality—emotional as well as intellectual—of their beliefs,” to “wonder what Faustus’s tragedy reveals about the nature of the God who, according to Christianity, has created and will judge us.” [3] In doing so, “he has forced upon us ‘the coveting of knowledge’—which is precisely Faustus’s kind of madness” and something Calvin explicitly condemns.

Shakespeare takes up Marlowe’s challenge in increasingly subtle ways, beginning with his great villain, Richard III. In Henry VI, Part three and Richard III, Shakespeare shows that “the tragic destruction of Richard is simultaneously the comedy of England’s salvation,” whereby “evil is done but good comes of it.” The last, evil, scion of the Plantagenet dynasty will be followed by the just and beneficent Tudors—according to the Tudors and their historians. But this happy ending cannot thoughtfully be regarded as happy, as the plays “show us that the meaning which has pleased us is, in fact, incomprehensible and terrifying,” a mystery; and the very “knowledge of our ignorance,” the quest to remedy that knowledge, “is a kind of madness.” That is, Socrates wasn’t the only sane man in Athens but only its most impressive lunatic, his erotic quest for wisdom illusory. 

Shakespeare represents the several theological stances of his time in his several characters: Richmond, the first of the Tudor line, “a vacuum in shining armor,” cheerfully asserts that God provides for England, celebrating the existence of “a God in whom it would be pleasant to believe”; Elizabeth (rather like Richard Hooker) maintains “that God must permit evil in order to preserve human freedom”; her enemy, Margaret, embraces not only divine vengeance on the wicked but divine punishment of the innocent—the deaths of the child princes in the Tower of London, at Richard’s direction—as the self-justifying will of God, a God who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children. Hunter remarks, “It will not do to dismiss Margaret’s vision of the God of her play as the ravings of a wicked woman,” as “her God is the inevitable corollary of Richmond’s God.” If Richmond is God’s providential instrument, as Richmond likes to think, then is not Richard equally His instrument? “By slaughtering the innocent he has served the mysterious purposes of Margaret’s ‘upright, just and true-disposing God.” For her, as for Luther, God is unjust, as far as we can now see. 

God is “the first cause of Richard’s nature.” Sensing that his nature must lead to his own destruction, by his own hand, Richard “creates a new self as an alternative to self-destruction,” succeeding only in perfecting himself as “an instrument designed to serve the will of God.” Born with a hunchback, Richard hates his deformation. Defining himself by that deformation and ruined by self-hatred, he is incapable of love or pity. The world is Hell; the only possible redemption is to seize the Crown but, loveless, he can have no heir and can only burn with resentment at all the Plantagenets who stand between him and monarchic power. He won’t achieve it, most immediately because he is “a Machiavel and a Machiavel can be most succinctly defined as an incompetent Machiavellian.” Isolated by his own nature, “I am my self alone” (Machiavelli describes his ‘Prince’ as a man alone); he must destroy his natural “power base,” the House of York. The ‘self’ he ‘creates’ “force[s] the men and women against whom Richard directs his destructive instincts to unite in hatred against him and to destroy him in order to preserve themselves,” men and women Richard cannot understand because they are “moved by [the] love and pity” he cannot summon within himself. He becomes one of God’s “vessels of wrath,” as described in Romans 9, “the fundamental gloss on Richard’s nature and significance.” Hunter points to the theological dilemma: “The creator of the self from which Richard creates himself is God and it is to that first creator’s decision to withhold love from his creature that Richard’s tragedy owes both its beginning and its end”; “a mystery remains in the questions of whether grace may not be offered even to this apparently reprobate creature.” 

It turns out that Richard does have a conscience, but it does him no good because he proudly denies its existence. Following Machiavelli, he avers that “Conscience is a word that Cowards use, / Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe, / Our strong arms be our Conscience, Swords our Laws.” In this, Richard preserves his “psychological self” by “invit[ing] the destruction of his spiritual self.” He “has not found grace before he goes into battle.” But “does Richard avoid grace or does grace refuse to bless him?” “Is the failure to complete the impulse toward contrition the result of Richard’s freely willed avoidance of grace, or of God’s refusal to bless the appeal? The play does not tell us, but it certainly asks us.” Can “justice exist in a world where accident does not”?

Hamlet, altogether more thoughtful, confronts the same mystery: “The will of Hamlet’s God is mysterious and his purposes are incomprehensible.” Hamlet can be sure that something is rotten in Denmark, but was the death of his father the king caused by his mother’s new husband, his uncle? And is the ghost of his father, who tells him to kill the murderer, really the ghost of his father, or a “diabolical illusion,” “the bait on a Satanic hook,” pulling him to damnation? Hamlet has become the most famous example of a person who cannot make up his mind, but his “fears are justifiable and not the rationalizations of a born shilly-shallier.” Hunter observes that the putative ghost’s behavior would raise suspicions, since Renaissance experts on the subject taught that genuine spirits released from Purgatory don’t “go about bellowing for revenge, and refrain from starting like guilty things when they hear a cock crow.” Hamlet’s resolve to test the conscience of the king—no easy task, as no one wears his conscience on his sleeve—evidences not irresolution but prudence. 

If Hamlet establishes Claudius’s guilt, he will be, like Richard, the instrument of God’s justice, “the scourge of heaven.” But “can a man serve as the scourge of heaven without being destroyed morally and spiritually?” Can he “both kill Claudius and save his own soul?” The test Hamlet devises, the play-within-the-play, does indeed catch the king’s conscience but it simultaneously reveals to Claudius that Hamlet is on to him. As it happens, Claudius is “an apparently anomalous but perhaps not uncommon figure: a Machiavellian Christian.” As a Machiavellian fox, he arranges for Hamlet’s banishment from Denmark; as a Christian, he prays to God for forgiveness but ultimately fails to repent, fails to choose confession: the Christian in him wants salvation, the Machiavellian in him wants the crown, “mine own ambition,” and the queen. The Machiavellian wins; it is not conscience that makes cowards of us all. For the audience, however, another question arises: “It is simultaneously and equally possible to interpret Claudius’s failure to repent as evidence that the god of the play in Calvin’s God, who has willed the reprobation of Claudius,” or Augustine’s God, who “has foreseen that Claudius will be unable to yield his consent to God’s summons” but has been given a fair chance to do so, thanks to the device of God’s instrument, Hamlet. Augustine’s God, foreknowing but liberating, presents us with “a terrifying mystery”; Calvin’s God, foreknowing and predetermining, “is less mysterious and more terrifying.” Hunter regards “Claudius’s failure to repent” as “the peripeteia of the play,” similar to that of Dr. Faustus. But Hamlet is in his own way equally guilty, refusing to kill Claudius while Claudius prays because “he wants to damn Claudius as well as kill him,” and “evil and absurd” desire, “for Hamlet is proposing to usurp the powers of God at the Last Judgment” or, perhaps more precisely, manipulate God into using His powers to damn his enemy. “The motives that prevent Hamlet’s committing a damnable act are themselves damnable”; “in the prayer scene Shakespeare is defining the action of the play as the mutual destruction of an elect protagonist and a reprobate antagonist.” The total number of deaths resulting will be seven, the number of days it took God to create the world, to deem it good, and to rest. Denmark too will be ‘recreated,’ purged of its rottenness, but after seven acts of destruction, not of creation. God is indeed working in mysterious but also terrifying ways. 

Hunter maintains that Hamlet, unlike Claudius, achieves “a state of grace at the end of the play,” but not via the Christian ways of repentance and faith. Instead, he comes “to understand that there is nothing to be done with necessities,” such as the necessity of killing the king in order to purge the kingdom, except “to meet them as necessities.” He sees that “the agonies of his self-reproach and the puzzlement of his will are parts of a process that will bring him inevitably to actions predetermined by a greater will.” He “accepts responsibility for what he has done and will do” but not “ultimate responsibility for it.” Shakespeare shows this in Hamlet’s response to his mistaken-identity killing of the counselor-fool, Polonius, which brings upon him the revenge of Polonius’s son, Laertes. “The two sons kill and forgive each other.” 

But does God forgive them? Hamlet does not know because he cannot. To Faustus’s “What will be, will be,” he answers, “Thy will be done.” “Nothing is easier to say or harder to mean and Hamlet’s ability to mean it is, for me, the final and indeed the only possible proof of what I must clumsily call his election.” As for Shakespeare, “his purpose is to catch the consciences of the guilty creatures who will sit at his play,” catch them in the “knowledge of our ignorance.”

If Richard III asks whether justice can coexist with comprehensive providential determination of human thought, and if Hamlet asks whether human beings can believe or do anything to induce God to save their souls, Othello asks about the status of love, human and divine. Othello thinks of his wife, Desdemona, “when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.” If love holds God’s creation together, then the denial of love will indeed return to chaos whatever portion of that creation that love reaches. “The laws that destroy and damn Othello govern all men and all created things and express, we must assume, the nature of their creator.” If so, then when chaos does come again, “does it do so because God lets it?” “Does our ability to sustain love depend upon God’s grace?”

As in Shakespeare’s other “Christian tragedies,” Othello “asks the question but does not answer it,” presenting its audience instead with “a series of possible answers.” Unlike Richard III and Hamlet, however, in Othello “the only good that comes of the tragic suffering…is the punishment of those who are guilty of inflicting pain upon the innocent.” God “appears to have withdrawn” from the world of Othello, leaving human wills free but incapable of bringing about anything like the triumph of the righteous Tudors or the purgation of Denmark’s corruption. In theological terms, “in Othello the Pelagian possibility replaces the Augustinian possibility which largely directs our conceiving of the worlds of Richard III and Hamlet.” In Othello, Shakespeare shows “his way of thinking about the possibility that the universe is not providentially ordered.” This is neither England nor Denmark in the wake of the Reformation but Venice, a commercial republic at the height of the Renaissance. Both commerce and the revival of humanism lend themselves to assertions of human freedom. But given such freedom, what then?

The villainous Iago or ‘Ego’ represents the spirit of freedom gone malignantly wrong. “To admit internal, supernatural grace as a working component of the psyche is, to the Pelagian, to deny the freedom of the will,” and Iago is a sort of super-Pelagian, a radical denier of divine grace. One might think that liberation from the weighty matter of predestination might result in the (welcome) death of tragedy. But “the implications of man’s freedom turn out to be at least as tragic as the implications of man’s bondage.”

But although Iago is in some sense right, given the metaphysical framework of the play, he is also “in another very basic way, wrong.” He does not know himself, failing to understand that he is “conducted by the blood and baseness of his nature to the most preposterous of conclusions—death by torture.” His hatred for Othello rules him; unlike Machiavelli, who adjures his readers to use the lion and the fox, to deploy one’s natural passions to the end of conquering Fortuna. Iago’s ego conceals itself from itself and allows its ruling passion to ruin it. More, “if Iago is right in his basic apprehension of the Pelagian freedom of his mind and universe, then Othello is right in his sense of what preserves mind and universe from destruction” which is “neither human reason nor divine grace,” neither philosophy nor Christianity, but “human love.” The problem is that “the unaided force of human love” fails to “balance the blood and baseness of our natures.” The Pelagian idea of the cosmic order comports with the Renaissance revival not merely of pre-Christian classicism, of ‘the ancients,’ but of the “pre-Socratic principles of love and strife,” the world of Empedocles. If Christianity is, as Richard III and Hamlet indicate, riddled with imponderables, with apparent contradictions, and the pre-Socratic understanding of nature as a precarious balance between love and strife practically untenable among humans, does this leave Socratic, that is, political, philosophy the last possibility?

Iago’s hatred is not rational, justifiable; one may rationally hate a Richard, a tyrant, but not an Othello. It an irrational necessity of his soul. Iago “must have an object for the destructive force that would otherwise destroy its possessor—and does, nonetheless, destroy its possessor.” Hunter concurs with Freudian critics who identify Iago’s hatred as “a product of the repression of an inadmissible, unconscious homosexual love,” the reverse of the natural love that holds nature together. Iago’s homosexual jealousy of Othello’s love of Desdemona pushes him to exploit the possibility of jealousy in the natural lover to destroy the object of his love and to consummate (in spirit if not in body) the unnatural love of the schemer. “Both characters are thus microcosms of an Empedoclean universe in which love and hate coexist in a dynamic and shifting interrelationship.”

“Desdemona is not such a microcosm.” She is Pelagian pure and simple, a person with “no need a supernatural grace,” having an abundance of the natural kind. “And yet the tragedy occurs despite that grace and innocence” because “the unaided force of human love,” which she embodies, “cannot balance the blood and baseness of our natures, as embodied in Othello,” exposed by Iago’s insinuations. She is Venus to his Mars and, like the ancient divinities, she initially rules him, “Our great Captain’s Captain.” “Harmony is the daughter of Venus and Mars and the sexual union of the god and goddess is a primary image of the principle of discordia concors,” the “union of Empedoclean Love and Empedoclean Strife, the origin of all forms and all order,” as seen most memorably in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This claim about nature, adopted by many thinkers of the Italian Renaissance, “is in some ways diametrically opposed to the Reformation view” that predominates in the other Christian tragedies. While loving Desdemona, “Othello, once a black slave, is now supremely at liberty,” a Pelagian liberated from the comprehensive forms of Christian predestination.

But his liberty poses a problem. Othello owes his freedom to his unrivaled ability “to defend Venice from its Moslem enemies, but an Othello in bondage to Eros would not be of much use against the Turk and so Othello protests that he will be able to keep the two scales of his couple nature in balance, enabling Mars to function in spite of Venus.” Without his martial virtues, neither Venice nor the Venus of Venice, neither the commercial republic nor Desdemona, can survive. “But this irony is complicated by the ‘providential’ destruction of the Turkish fleet, by the consequent evaporation of the need to meet strife with strife, and finally by our suspicion that precisely this loss of function leaves the destructive force in Othello free to destroy the love which should control it”—free, but soon trapped in Machiavel Iago’s conspiratorial equivalent of the net Vulcan forged to trap Mars and Venus. There is a difference: in the ancient myth, the netting of Mars and Venus is comical; the gods laugh at their struggles. But “in the Pelagian world of Othello, the emergence of the good must depend entirely upon man’s unaided ability to sustain the good of which he may be momentarily capable,” and here tragedy begins. Othello, “though a more than ordinarily good man, does not have a rational will sufficiently strong to keep his hatred in check without the help of love.” Chaos comes again, in his mind and actions, culminating in “the fall of the great man” into “an epileptic fit.” That is, “in spite of the nobility” of Othello’s “free nature, the horrors occur; because of the freedom of that nature, human nature, even when noble, is revealed as cruel and unjust the source of tragic horror.” Othello fights “not just a battle with the shadows brought into being by Iago’s lies” but “a struggle between the component parts of Othello’s mind and the forces that move him to destruction,” which “derive from the mind itself.” His reason mistakes good for evil, evil for good, but then “he compounds error with crime, because error so upsets the proper balance between love and strife that the mind becomes possessed with a lust for destruction, a desire to destroy love itself.” In a Pelagian world, “man, in his freedom from divine grace, must substitute human love for that grace and that is not possible” because (as Desdemona says) “men are not Gods.” The human Mars is as readily trapped as the divine one was, and the human Venus lacks the divine power to protect herself. Pure love cannot protect itself, but if love allies with strife, “there is the danger that the scales of our life will lose their balance and destruction gain the ascendancy as it does with Othello.” Desdemona’s lord, Othello, is no replacement for the Lord Jesus Christ; Renaissance humanism cannot truly replace Christianity, and neither can Machiavelli, enemy of both Christianity and humanism, with his virtù. Even Hamlet, more prudent than Othello and more just than him, too, no Machiavellian prince and “less free to follow the evil impulses of his nature” thanks to Christianity, can find salvation, if he finds it, not in prudence or goodness but in forgiveness, and then only on a stage littered with corpses.

Macbeth, too, is a play full of “torn bodies.” “Macbeth’s great enemy” is “decent human emotion,” especially the emotion of Pity, the “naked, newborn babe” who bestrides the wind in one of Shakespeare’s most unsettling images. A babe numbers among those torn bodies, as “Lady Macbeth’s imagined infanticide is the most horrible crime it is possible for her to conceive,” a thought of “supreme unnaturalness”; another causes a torn body, the body of Macduff’s mother, killed when her son is from her womb untimely ripped. To the protest, surely the newborn child did not willfully cause his mother’s death, Hunter replies that this only shifts the guilt to God, whose will “ultimately caused” that agonized death. What is more, if Luther and Calvin are right, “any newborn babe is as guilty and as subject to eternal punishment as Lady Macbeth herself.” Not only is Macduff both “guilty and innocent of the death of his mother,” he is “also guilty and innocent of the deaths of his wife and children,” killed because he had the courage to oppose Macbeth and “the stupidity” to leave them unguarded. 

Macbeth differs from Hamlet in one important way: in it, the political tragedy rivals the personal tragedy for prominence. Scotland is in revolt against Duncan, “a lawful monarch and a saintly man.” “Macbeth’s murder of Duncan is not, like Claudius’s fratricide, a personal crime primarily, but rather one which a sizable proportion of the society is trying to commit and for which the entire society will inevitably suffer,” a “hideous blasphemy” likened to the death of Christ and, like it, “attended by storm and darkness.” If Macduff acts as God’s “elect instrument for the destruction of an evil king,” the usurper Macbeth, “in depicting Macduff’s agony for what he sees as his guilt for the deaths of his wife and children, Shakespeare is dramatizing realistically the horrors of life under tyranny,” in which the innocent die and the avenger would kill not only Macbeth but his children, too, if he had any (after all, they might claim inheritance of the throne). “Macduff’s example suggests one meaning for election: the good man will not do the evil that he cannot do.”

As for Macbeth himself, he “fears the contents of his own mind, and well he might.” Hearing the witches’ prophecy of his future ascension to the throne, he senses himself “rapt” by a diabolical force, even as the Apostle Paul was “rapt” by God. “Obsessed with images of evil,” this raptness and obsession could be “the unaided products of Macbeth’s imagination,” natural phenomena, if perverse or unnatural in the moral sense, or “the result of the working of diabolical powers.” “Is Macbeth’s will free to exclude these images of evil from his mind? Again, it seems to me, the play does not give us an answer.” “Macbeth may be criminal, or insane, or self-damned, or reprobate.” Unlike the reprobate Richard, the elect Hamlet, or the freely willing Othello, with Macbeth “Shakespeare keeps the possibilities in suspension.”

To conceive Macbeth as a criminal, as a man who could have resisted the temptations presented to him in his imagination, is supported by the fact of his Machiavellian calculation, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well, / It were done quickly”—a formulation Hunter too-Machiavellianly ascribes to “political reason.” But having so calculated, Macbeth becomes less rational, not more, during the course of his actions, his mind seemingly in the tightening grip of insanity. Yet “by an act of will, he ceases to be mad,” making the image of Banquo’s ghost disappear. From then on, he becomes “a bored thug.” “The triumph of Macbeth’s will is a Pyrrhic victory. In order to destroy the vision of Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth must destroy its source, his imaginative power.” He is left with “a kind of rational madness,” his soul with “neither pity, love, nor fear,” a “damned soul, despairing and brutish, whose life is a horror to be waded through.” By destroying his imagination, “the instrument through which the forces of evil exercise their power over him,” he alters the nature of his will, bringing on his “spiritual self-destruction.” The naked babe who rides the wind is Christ, whose “pity for humanity” will cause men to destroy Macbeth if he murders Duncan. And so it does.

“In Macbeth the suspicion that the events of the play are preordained is always present and that suspicion is a logical inference from the witches’ knowledge of the contents of future time.” If so, then Macbeth’s “psychomachies are sciamachies, the struggles of a walking shadow,” for whom tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow do indeed creep along at their petty pace, without meaning. While “the beneficence of providence is reasserted strongly at the end,” with Scotland freed of the murderous Macbeths, the play shows that, “experienced from within, by its victim and instrument, the providential pattern signifies nothing.”

King Lear‘s events occur in pre-Christian England, but the last scene, with Lear holding the body of his daughter in his arms and telling witnesses to look at her lips (are they moving?), reminds Hunter of a pieta; the ever-resourceful witness, Edgar, calls the blind Lear a “side-piercing sight,” a crucifixion for those who witness it. “What is the nature of Christ’s presence in King Lear?” And “what is the relationship of nature in this art,” this play, “to the nature outside art”? “Unique among the tragedies, I believe,” King Lear “considers religious questions in a pagan context,” showing nature “by the light of nature.” To Hunter, Edgar’s noble and indeed kindly lie to his father, Gloucester, convincing the elderly man that the powers controlling nature are “not only righteous, but beneficent,” is belied by nature itself, by the very “nihilist pieta” Lear and Cordelia present—the “promis’d end” or “image of that horror,” unredeemed by any providential, Creator-God. “By the light of nature King Lear is either incomprehensible or meaningless, or both.” “In a state of nature, without the knowledge or the grace of God, we are nothing.” At best, human beings can evade natural nihilism by telling one another, or by telling themselves, comforting lies. However, “I cannot discover that the play assigns transcendent value to love and compassion.” Such sentiments are impotent before the great I-Am-Not. 

But in his consideration of this pre-Christian play, is Hunter insufficiently ‘pagan’? When Gloucester tells his son that he might as well give up, that where he is a good enough place in which to rot, the son gives his father fatherly advice: Man must endure his coming and his going, but “ripeness is all.” That isn’t Christianity; it is Aristotle. Aristotle, who writes of tragedy but is no tragedian, and no nihilist. The question then becomes, what if Aristotle, like Edgar, had had his side pierced? (According to one story, he understood that as a danger for philosophers, fleeing Athens in order to prevent it from sinning twice.)

Hunter concludes, rightly, that Shakespeare’s plays present not only a rich variety of human beings but place those persons into many regimes, political and spiritual. He describes this strategy with John Keats’s term, “negative capability”—”when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Perhaps too ‘Romantic’ for Shakespeare, who by Hunter’s own testimony teases us into thought, not out of it?

 

Notes

1. “Semi-Pelagianism is the natural condition of popular theology. The ordinary Christian believes in original sin—in Adam’s fall we sinned all—but he also thinks that it is up to him to be as good as possible and he feels that if he does his best, it will probably be none too good, but God will understand. The medieval miracle plays are designed so as to instruct the layman without contradicting this view of life” by “simply disregard[ing] the comparatively esoteric problems raised by the concept of prevenient grace and its challenge to the freedom of the will, or by the doctrine of election and the doctrine of reprobation which it apparently implies.”
2. All five principal apostles concur: see Matthew 12: 30-32, Mark 3: 25-30; Luke 12: 8-10; Hebrews 6: 4-6 and 1 John 5:16.
3. In Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Richard Hooker was then “attempting to conceive a less monstrous God than the one who rules the world of Dr. Faustus.” For discussion, see “Reason within the Limits of Religion Alone: The Achievement of Richard Hooker,” on this website under Bible Notes.