François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Books, 2011. [1811].

Part Three: Rhodes, Jaffa, Bethlehem, the Dead Sea.

Part Four: Jerusalem.

Part Five: Jerusalem—Continued.

Part Six: Egypt.

Part Seven: Tunis and Return to France.

 

Chateaubriand voyaged to Jerusalem on a ship with some 200 Greek pilgrims, joyful at the thought of visiting the Holy Land, fearful of Mediterranean storms on the way. (“The ancient Greeks were, in many respects, no more than delightful credulous children, who passed from sadness to joy with extreme fluidity; the modern Greeks have retained aspects of that character: happy at least in having recourse to levity to combat their misery.”) Listening to his fellow passengers, he observed, “the chanting of the Greek Church possesses considerable sweetness, but lacks gravity,” although he admires “the sadness and majesty” of the Kyrie eleison, “doubtless a remnant of the ancient singing of the primitive Church.” He was disappointed that the captain refused to land near the plain of Troy (“though our agreement obliged him to do so”), as “it is a rare destiny for a country to have inspired the finest verse of two of the world’s greatest poets,” Homer and Virgil, neither a singer lacking in gravity. But on balance, “Who could not bless religion, whilst reflecting that these two hundred pilgrims, so happy at this moment, were nevertheless bowed under an odious yoke?”—the yoke of the Ottoman Turks. “They were traveling to the tomb of Jesus Christ to forget the lost glories of their homeland, and find solace from their present evils.” As for himself, “I was about to reach a land of wonders, the source of the most astonishing poetry, places where, even speaking of mankind alone, the greatest of events occurred, that changed the world forever, I mean the coming of the Messiah.” Contemporary reality nonetheless intrudes. Along the coast off Caesarea, he saw “Arabs, wandering the coast, follow[ing], with a covetous eye, our ship passing by on the horizon, anticipating the spoils of shipwreck on the same coast where Jesus Christ commanded us to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.”

At Jaffa, “a wreced cluster of houses gathered together, he lodged at a monastery, where the monks “were lively but modest—; familiar but polite; no pointless questions, no idle curiosity,” concerned only with his trip, especially “on the measures needed for me to complete it in safety.” They well represented “the land where Christianity and charity had their birth.” He should not go to Jerusalem alone, they tell him, as the Arabs will rob and possibly kill him. Go with some guides, disguise yourselves as poor pilgrims. The Arabs’ avariciousness results from tyranny. Although the soil “appears to be extremely fertile,” “thanks to the despotic Muslims, the ground on all sides offers only thistles and dry withered grasses, interspersed with stunted patches of cotton, sorghum, barley and wheat.” Still, “if I live a thousand years, I shall never forget that desert which seems to breathe again the greatness of Jehovah and the terror of death (our old French Bibles call death the king of terror).” As a Frenchman, he thinks not only of the prophets and saints of the Bible but of the Crusader, Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the triumphant First Crusade against the Sunni Muslim Turks of the Seljuk Empire and briefly King of Jerusalem. His successor, Baldwin I, built the strong walls of the next monastery Chateaubriand lodged in, which “could easily resist a siege against the Turks.” He arrived in Bethlehem. The monastery in the place of Jesus’ birth housed “three or four thousand skulls, those of monks massacred by the infidels” over the centuries. From the monastery, he could see Jerusalem, “a heap of shattered stone,” a “city of desolation, in the midst of a desolate solitude,” truly “the Queen of the Desert.”

Moving next to the shores of the Dead Sea, “we found ourselves on the paths of the desert Arabs, who gather salt from the sea, and wage pitiless war on the traveler,” following a “Bedouin morality [that] has begun to deteriorate through too much traffic with the Turks and Europeans,” permitting them to “prostitute their daughters and their wives, and slaughter travelers, whom they were once content merely to rob.” They resembled the Amerindians physically, but “in the Americas everything proclaims the savage who has not yet reached the state of civilization; amongst the Arabs all proclaims the civilized man fallen once more into a state of savagery.” He prayed on the banks of the Jordan River, drinking from it; “it did not seem as sweet as sugar, as a good missionary has said,” but a bit salty, potentially improved “if purged of the sand it carries.” 

In Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher burned down a year after Chateaubriand’s return to France, so he takes care to describe it as it was, a building “roughly in the form of a cross,” with a dome that was supported by cedar beams from Lebanon. Inside, priests from eight Christian sects abide: Latins, Abyssinians, Greeks, Egyptian Copts, Armenians, Nestorians (from Chaldea and Syria), Georgians, and Maronites. The priests rotate in and out, with two-month stints, since the staleness and “unhealthy coolness” of the air would make any longer stay dangerous. Nonetheless, Chateaubriand met a solitary Franciscan who had lived there for twenty years, busily maintaining the many lamps and keeping the holy places clean. The Sepulcher encompasses the place Jesus was crucified and the tomb where He was resurrected, although these claims have been disputed. Chateaubriand will have none of that. “It is, indeed, with the Bible and the Gospel in our hands that we must travel to the Holy Land. If one wishes to bring to it a spirit of contention and argument, it is not worth the trouble of making the long journey to Judea.” For himself, “all I can state is that in sight of that victorious tomb I felt only my own feebleness.” Death, where is thy victory? “Where might one find anything as moving in all antiquity, anything as wonderful as the last scenes of the Gospel? Here are not the bizarre adventures of some deity alien to mankind: here is a story filled with pathos, a story that not only causes one to shed tears at its beauty, but of which the consequences applied to the universe, have changed the face of the earth.”

Outside the Church, he does not fail to stop at monuments to Godfrey and Baldwin, “those royal knights, who deserve to rest near to the great sepulcher they had delivered.” As always, Chateaubriand mixes reverence for the universal Church with patriotism: “Those ashes are French, the only ones buried in the shadow of the tomb of Jesus Christ. What a badge of honor for my homeland!”

Nearby, Chateaubriand saw the ruins of a church dedicated to Mary, where, as Church tradition has it, she met her Son carrying the cross. “Saint Boniface says that the Virgin fell like one half-dead, and could not utter a single word.” “Faith is not contrary to these traditions: they show how the marvelous story of the Passion was etched in the memory of mankind,” and in the eighteen centuries since the Crucifixion, seeing “persecutions without end, endless revolutions, ruins ever falling,” nothing could “efface or hide the traces of a mother come to mourn her son.” Chateaubriand himself followed the Via Dolorosa. At Gethsemane, he recalled “the terrible degradations in life” that Jesus suffered, degradations “that virtue itself finds difficulty in overcoming,” requiring an angel “to descend from heaven to support Divinity, faltering under the burden of human misery, that merciful Divinity is betrayed by Mankind.” But after this torture and death, “while the world worshipped a thousand false deities under the sun, twelve fishermen, concealed in the bowels of the earth,” in the caves to which they had fled, “uttered their profession of faith on behalf of the human race and recognized the unity of God, the creator of those stars beneath which they dared not, as yet, proclaim his existence.” “And yet they would overthrow [the] Roman’s temples, destroy the religion of his fathers, alter the law, politics, morality, reasoning, and even the thoughts of mankind.” From these facts, Chateaubriand concludes, “Let us never despair then of the salvation of nations”; even today, Christians “mourn the waning of faith,” but “who knows if God has not planted in some neglected place that grain of wild mustard seed that multiplies in the fields?” 

Far from a credulous believer, Chateaubriand doubts that a footprint in the rock on the spot where Jesus ascended into Heaven is really His, despite the assertions of Saints Augustine, Jerome, Paulinus, and other authorities. He concedes that even Descartes and Newton never denied such traditions; Racine and Milton “repeated them in poetry.”

Recounting Jerusalem’s subsequent history, Chateaubriand defends the Crusades, portrayed in “an odious light” by the Enlighteners of the eighteenth century and, it might be added, by many in the centuries after Chateaubriand wrote. “The Christians were not the aggressors.” “If the subjects of Umar,” the great caliph, father-in-law of Mohammad, “leaving Jerusalem, eventually descended, after ranging through Africa, on Sicily, Spain, and even France itself, where Charles Martel destroyed them” at the Battle of Tours in 732, “why should the subjects of Philip I, emerging from France, not range through Asia Minor, as far as Jerusalem, to take vengeance on the descendants of Umar?” Moreover, the Crusaders weren’t “simply armed pilgrims seeking to deliver a tomb in Palestine.” “It was not only a question of the holy tomb, but also about which [religion] would prevail on earth, a religion which was an enemy of civilization, systematically maintaining ignorance, despotism, and slavery, or a religion that revived the spirit of ancient knowledge in the modern world and abolished slavery,” a religion of “persecution and conquest” against a religion of “tolerance and peace.” For eight centuries, Christians endured the Muslim conquest of Spain, the invasion of France, “the ravaging of Greece and the two Sicilies,” and “the whole of Africa enchained.” “If, ultimately, the cries of so many slaughtered victims in the East, and the barbarian advance to the very gates of Constantinople, awakened Christendom and roused it to its own defense, who would dare claim that the Crusaders’ cause was unjust? Where would we be if our fathers had not met force with force?” Chateaubriand has already shown where Europe would be: it would be in the condition of Greece under “the Muslim yoke” of the Turks. Would “those who applaud the progress of enlightenment today…wish to see a religion prevail among us that burned the library of Alexandria” and “considers it a merit to trample mankind underfoot”? Far from shameful, “the era of these expeditions represents the heroic age of our history,” the “age that gave birth to our epic poetry,” with Tasso, a Christian Homer or Virgil. (“Above all a poem for soldiers, Jerusalem Delivered “breathes valor and glory.”) “All that cloaks a nation with wonder ought not to be despised by that nation itself,” and “there is something in our hearts that makes us love glory,” human beings being more than utilitarian calculators of “their own good and ill.” 

The Muslim Saladin, Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, founder of the Ayyubid Dynasty, besieged and reconquered Jerusalem in 1187. Nominal legitimacy in Jerusalem passed to several European monarchs, and rule over the city was contended for, until 1291, when “the Christians were driven from the Holy Land, utterly.” “Is it any surprise that a fertile country was turned to a wasteland after such devastation,” having been sacked seventeen times? After that, Muslim empires contended for it, with the Turks finally seizing it from Egypt and Syria in 1516—this “pile of rubble, called a city.” As Chateaubriand understates it, “the people of the East are much more familiar than we with the ideas of invasion,” although Europeans of Napoleon’s time are sufficiently familiar with them. As a result of their violent geopolitical experiences, Asians have become “accustomed to follow the destiny of some master or other,” with “no code binding them to concepts of order and moderation; to kill when you are the stronger seems to them a legitimate proceeding; they submit to it, or exercise, it, with a like indifference…. Freedom, they do not know; rights, they have none: force is their god.” Back at the monastery, Chateaubriand encountered an example of such moeurs in the form of two drunken soldiers of the Pasha’s army, who tried to push him around. He returned the insult, with no further troubles. “A Turk once humiliated is never dangerous, and we heard nothing more of it.” The monks, “guardians of the tomb of Jesus Christ,” have been “uniquely occupied, for several centuries, in defending themselves” against similar “kinds of insult and tyranny,” the “most bizarre inventions of Oriental despotism.” He notices also the Jews of Jerusalem, similarly subject, yet “fortified by their poverty,” “clothed in rags, seated among the dust of Zion, looking for insects which they devour,” but with “their eyes fixed on the Temple” and never neglecting to study the Pentateuch with their children. 

After exploring the sites of Crusader battles described by Tasso (“I am delighted to become the first writer to render that immortal poet the same honor that those before me have rendered to Homer and Virgil”),Chateaubriand moves from the military realm to the political, providing an outline of Jerusalem’s ruling offices. The regime consists of a military governor, a minister of justice, a mufti (both a religious leader and “head of the legal profession,” since the city is under the sharia or Muslim law), a customs officer, and a city provost. “These subordinate tyrants all belong, except the mufti, to a tyrant in chief, and that tyrant in chief is the Pasha of Damascus,” himself appointed by the Turks. “Every superior in Turkey…has the right to delegate his powers to an inferior, and those powers extend to control over property and life.” As for the mufti, when he is “a fanatic or a wicked man, like the one found in Jerusalem during my visit, he is the most tyrannical of all the authorities as regards Christians.” This remained so more than a century later, as seen in the tenure of Grand Mufti Mohammad amin al-Husayn, the Nazi ally during World War II. Since mountains and Bedouins stand between Damascus and Jerusalem, protests against local tyranny are often impossible to lodge, which is rather the point: the rulers “want mute slavery.” The current Pasha, “driven by sordid avarice, like almost all Muslims,” enriches himself by inducing the merchants to close their shops, thereby starving the people; when permitted to reopen, the merchants “bring in food at extraordinary prices, and the populace, dying of hunger for a second time, are forced, in order to live, to strip themselves to their last garment.” The Pasha thus takes his cut of the profits and keeps the people down. In a more straightforward maneuver, the Pasha used his cavalry to plunder Arab farmers of their livestock, which he then sold to Jerusalem butchers at exorbitant prices, which they were forced to purchase “on pain of death.” “After exhausting Jerusalem’s resources, the Pasha withdraws,” along with his soldiers, leaving the city governor with inadequate resources. Gangs of thieves take over and neighboring villages resume blood feuds previously suppressed. Once he regroups, in a year or so, the governor imposes peace by “exterminat[ing] whole tribes.” “Gradually the desert spreads further.” Walking the streets of the unpaved and deserted streets of the city, where “a few miserable shops display their wretchedness to your gaze,” the only sound to be heard is a horse bearing a Janissary “who brings the head of some Bedouin, or who is off to rob the fellahin.” Chateaubriand can leave Jerusalem, without having delivered it. For the foreseeable future, from the perspective of 1806, no human being will.

Still, “I confess that I felt a certain sense of pleasure, in considering that I had accomplished the pilgrimage I had meditated for so long.” He expected his return to France through Egypt, the Barbary States, and Spain to be easy. “I was wrong, however.” Back on the Mediterranean, he praises the adventurousness of the sailor’s way of life, with its “continual passage from storm to storm, the rapid change of land and sky,” which “stimulate the voyager’s imagination”: “It is, in its unfolding, the very image of man here below; forever promising himself to remain in port, and forever spreading his sails; seeking enchanted islands which he will never reach, and where if he landed he would only experience ennui; speaking only of repose, yet delighting in the tempest; perishing in the midst of some shipwreck, or dying an old pilot on the shore, unknown to the young voyagers whose vessels he regrets being powerless to follow.” Chateaubriand’s immediate future would confirm those observations.

 From the land of the Israelites to the land from which they had fled: Egypt is “the country where civilization was born, and where today ignorance and barbarism reign.” In Alexandria, once “the sanctuary of the Muses, and which echoed in the darkness to the noisy revels of Antony and Cleopatra,” “a fatal talisman has plunged into the silence of the people,” the talisman of despotism, “which extinguishes all joy and allows not even a cry of pain.” Ancient Alexandria had a population of three million; today, a million remain, “a sort of palpitating trunk that has not even the strength, between the ruins and the tombs, to free itself from its chains.” The beautiful Nile, with its magnificent Delta, lacks only “a free government and a happy people. “But no country is beautiful that lacks liberty: the most serene of skies is odious, if one is chained to the earth.” “The only thing I found worthy of those beautiful plains was the memory of my country’s glory.” During the Seventh Crusade, in 1250, the French army under the command of Louis IX—Saint Louis—were defeated by Egyptian forces, which captured the king. The French knights “were avenged by the soldiers at the Battle of the Pyramids” in 1798, in one of the very few Napoleonic ventures Chateaubriand can bring himself to praise. The brief French occupation (they were expelled by the British in 1801) saw the founding of the Institut d’Égypte, institutionalizing research on ancient Egypt; it saw the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, whose bilingual texts enabled scholars to translate hieroglyphics much more fully; and it enabled the establishment of Egypt’s first newspapers, giving Egyptians a chance at self-government. But self-government is a long way off. Now a land infested with “Albanian brigands” and “foolish Muslims,” once a country “where so industrious, so peaceful, so wise, a people once lived, a people whose customs and morals Herodotus and above all Diodorus Siculus were pleased to describe for us,” Egypt illustrates what difference “the rule of law can make between men.” 

To the past, then. Ancient Egypt’s pyramids excited Chateaubriand’s imagination. “I know the philosopher may well smile or groan at the thought that the greatest monument built by human hands is a tomb; but why see in the pyramid of Cheops only a heap of stones and a skeleton?” The pyramids are monuments not to death but to immortality, “mark[ing] the entrance to life without end, it is a species of eternal portal built on the edge of eternity.” As Diodorus Siculus remarked, the pyramid builders “give little thought to the furnishings of their palaces, but with regard to their burial they display every zeal,” unlike modern men who “prefer to believe that all the monuments had a material purpose,” never imagining “that nations might possess a moral purpose of a far superior order, which the laws of antiquity served.” “Why complain that a pharaoh sought to render that lesson eternal?” And do not such monuments, “an essential part of the glory of all human society,” bear “glorious witness to [a nation’s] genius”? Cheops was no vain fool but “a monarch possessed of a magnanimous spirit.” “The idea of vanquishing time by means of a tomb, of forcing the sea of generations, customs, laws, ages to break against the foot of a coffin, could never have arisen from a common mind. If it is merely pride, at least it is magnificent pride.”

No such great-souled monarch rules modern Egypt. Chateaubriand had an audience with the Pasha’s adolescent son, who was “seated on a carpet in a dilapidated room, surrounded by a dozen obliging servants who hastened to obey his every whim. I have never seen a more hideous spectacle”: the future master of the Egyptians, nurtured “on a diet of the most extravagant flattery” by servants who “degraded the soul of a child destined to lead men.” “Although I may have delighted in Egypt,” with its natural beauty, its noble monuments, its excellent wine, the capital, Alexandria, “seemed the saddest and most desolate place on earth.” 

Christmas Day of 1806 brought him to the waters off Malta, but off Tunis, where they arrived a few days later, the sea roiled for eighteen days, and they nearly ran aground on the island of Lampedusa. Two British warships sank in that storm, but “Providence saved us,” as the wind changed and carried them into the open sea. Eventually, they reached the Kerkennah Islands, where they remained at anchor past New Year’s Day. “Under how many stars, and with what varied fortunes, had I witnessed the birth of years, the years that pass so swiftly or last so long!” From the New Year’s days of childhood, “when I received parental blessings and gifts, my heart beating with joy,” to this “foreign vessel, in sight of a barbarous land, this day arrived for me without witnesses, without pleasure, without the embrace of a family, without those tender wishes of happiness for her son that a mother utters with such sincerity. This day, born in the womb of storm winds, brought to my brow only worries, regrets and white hair.” He and the crew nonetheless marked the occasion by slaughtering some chickens and offering a toast to France. “We were not far from the island of the Lotus Eaters, where Ulysses’ companions forgot their homeland: I know no fruit delightful enough to make me forget mine.”

Safely in Tunisia at last, Chateaubriand enjoyed the hospitality of a French family; “the ashes of Dido, and the ruins of Carthage, were regaled with the sounds of a French violin.” The regime of ancient Carthage has not won the favor of later generations. If one wonders why “no one thinks of the eighty thousand Carthaginians slaughtered on the plains of Sicily,” in alliance with the Persians, “while the whole world speaks of those three hundred Spartans who died obeying the sacred laws of their country,” one might consider that “it is the greatness of the cause, not the means, which leads to true fame, and honor has been in all ages the most enduring feature of glory.” And even if Hannibal is “the greatest general of antiquity,” as Chateaubriand judges him to be, “he is not the one we love most.” “He had neither Alexander’s heroism nor Caesar’s universal talent; but he surpassed both as a master of war.” Animated “solely by hatred,” crossing the Pyrenees, Gaul, and the Alps, he crushed Roman forces in four consecutive battles. With unquestionable “superiority of mind and strength of character,” he nonetheless “lacked the noblest qualities of the spirit: cold, cruel, heartless, born to overthrow and not to found empires, he was much inferior in magnanimity to his rival,” Scipio Africanus. With Scipio “begins that Roman urbanity, which ornamented the minds of Cicero, Pompey, and Caesar, and which in those illustrious citizens replaced the rusticity of Cato and Fabricius.” Driving the Carthaginian forces south, through Spain, Scipio defeated Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE. “Hannibal had been away from his homeland for thirty-six years; he left as a child, and had returned at an advanced age,” nearly a stranger to his country. “Blind with envy,” his fellow citizens sent him into exile. “When services rendered are so exceptional they exceed the bounds of understanding, they reap only ingratitude.” He “had the misfortune to be greater than the people amongst whom he was born.” (Bounced out of the prime minister’s office in 1946, discarded by French voters in 1969, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle number among the more recent examples of this.) As for Scipio, Chateaubriand accepts the possibility that he died by an assassin’s hand. 

As for France, Saint Louis arrived with his troops in 1270, his Crusaders admiring “the beauty of the country covered with olive trees.” “The chaplain of a king of France took possession of the site of Hannibal’s city with these words: ‘I proclaim the rule here of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Louis, King of France, his servant.’ This same place had heard declarations in Gaetulian, Tyrian, Latin, Vandal, Greek and Arabic, and ever the same sentiments in varying languages.” After the French army drove out the Saracens, “the great ladies of France established themselves in the ruins of Dido’s palace.” 

The occupation didn’t last. The Muslims had machines that could raise the hot sand of the surrounding deserts into the wind blowing toward the French, “an ingenious and terrible design, worthy of the wilderness that gave rise to the idea, and show[ing] to what point mankind can take its genius for destruction.” Struck by a disease that had already carried away a beloved son, Louis left a testament to his eldest son and heir. “If God send thee adversity, receive it in patience, and give thanks to Our Lord, and think that thou hast deserved it, and that He will turn it to good. If He give thee prosperity, thank heaven with humility; that through pride or otherwise thou mayest not be the worse for that which should make thee better. For one should not war against God with His own gifts.” And “study how thy people and thy subjects may live in peace and honesty under thee.” Chateaubriand remarks, “Happy are those who can glory in that, and say: ‘The man who wrote these instructions was my ancestral king.'” And “the ambassadors of the Emperor of Constantinople were present at the scene: they could tell all Greece of a death which Socrates would have admired.”

“I have nothing more to say to my readers; it is time for them to return with me to my homeland.” “I have written enough if my name should live on; too much if it is fated to die.”

 

 

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 Monee, 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 Adventures of 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 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 is 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 has 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, by 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 mathematician 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).