Customer Reviews

Love in the Western World

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This is a curious, compelling study that is likely to generate as much controversy for its style as for its amalgamation of historical, cultural, literary, operatic, biblical and theological traditions. Rougement traces the "courtly love" tradition from its orgins among 12th century troubadors in southern France through the high Romanticism of 19th century opera to the modern-day consequences of a love that is based on Eros, delusion, and selfishness--a passion that lives for passion, and whose only consummation can be death (for were it to endure, to be exposed to the glaring light of day, it would no longer be romantic passion). Rougement's scholarship is solid, his interpretations provocative, and his proximity to his subject uncomfortably "close" for someone bearing the mantle of cultural critic and scholar. In fact, it's impossible not to feel the conflicted emotions of the author himself. On the one hand, he presents himself as the enemy of "Eros" and proponent of "Agape," as the critic of immature, romantic passion and the defender of mature relationships based on a realistic "dialogue" between two unique, complex individuals. On the other hand, he reveals the heart and soul of an incurable romantic, someone who has been love's thrall, who has been swept up in the dark rapture and sublimely lyrical death wish that is Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." But far from being a liability, that underlying tension provides the book's argument with an energy, vitality and, yes, "passion" that is lacking in similar studies of this fascinating topic. At times I was suspicious that the author might turn out to be an idealogue, tedious moralist, or Christian "fundamentalist," given the zeal and curiously evangelical flavor of many of his sentences. Not to worry. His intellectual kinship is with Kierkegaard, though he finally falls short of the "leap of faith" and spiritual "marriage" achieved by the melancholy Dane. As proof of the foregoing, I defy any close reader of this text to leave the book more repelled than enticed, entranced, and ultimately entrapped by the Tristan and Isolde myth. Rarely have I read a work in which an author so convincingly argues against himself.

It is a great reading, though not easy, to fully understand this book you need to have a knowledge of european literature concepts (from the courtly love on).
If you don't have such fundamentals however you will only find it a little more difficult but not less interesting.
I'd recommend this book to anyone who want to understand more about not only his way of falling in and feeling Love, but also about his Culture.
Very interesting also the comparisons and discussions about the Eastern culture and influence on the West.
It's a little bit depressing thinking that such books are nowadays sold at such low prices and out-of-print; the subject and discussions have not actually gone out-of-print and probably won't for a couple of centuries ahead.

'Is there something fatal to marriage at the heart of human longing?' This is one of de Rougemont's key questions. And it seems to be based on his sense that the only true passionate love, is adulterous love, the love of the forbidden, the hidden love of the knight for the Lady who belongs to another.
In tracing the 'Myth of Love' in the Western literary tradition through the past seven centuries de Rougemont finds a central theme, that the Love of Passion, the Love of Eros is not the love of Agape, the Love of Christian charity. It is instead that sinful forbidden love for the one who one has no right to.
Here I do not doubt that de Rougemont has isolated a central motif , theme , ' topoi' of Western Literature, and perhaps of Literatures, not Western also. I do not wish to minimize its importance , and as I write this the image of 'Bovary' and 'Anna Karenina' both come as its confirmation.
Yet there also is in my my mind the image of another kind of Love, Biblical love, of Abraham's love for Sarah, of Isaac's for Rebecca, of Jacob's for Rachel. Those loves, at the beginning of one side of the Western Literary tradition seem to me to suggest a kind of passionate intimacy , whose model is sanctity. That is to say against de Rougemont I would want to say that there is a kind of passionate love in marriage , outside the Romantic as he sees it, and this passionate love is the love of Kedushah of holiness. It is too the kind of love which Tolstoy portrays in his parallel- couple to Anna and Vronsky, Kitty and Levin.
In any case the rich suggestiveness of de Rougemont's study and the depth of his thought make it a , at times dense and difficult , but also particularly meaningful work.

Rougemont's study of romantic love as a cultural phenomenon is an engaging and, at its best, compelling account of the origin and development of the western "cult" of romantic love between the sexes. He begins with a lucid reading of the myth of Tristan and Isolde, which exists in several medieval versions, showing how and why the mythic lovers seem to seek out barriers to their love rather than consummate it. Rougemont eventually links the Tristan myth to the early lyrics of the twelfth-century Troubador poets of southern France, whose lyrics are the foundation of the "courtly love" tradition in subsequent medieval and Renaissance poetry. Rougemont asks where the Troubadors got the idea that it was noble and poetic to pay erotic homage to an idealized lady who was beyond one's social reach. His answer is that the "courtly love" poems of the early Middle Ages arose from misappropriations of hymns developed by the heretical Cathars, a mystical sect that flourished in southern France in the twelfth century but was fiercely persecuted and eventually wiped out, leaving few authentic records of their beliefs. Nevertheless, Rougemont argues that the sect's predecessors included the Manichees of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, as well as earlier Gnostic cults of the Near East. The Cathars, he suggests, composed mystical hymns to a figurative "lady" who represented the essence of the cult itself. He argues that the Troubadors seized on these hymns and used their conventions to address real ladies in Provencal courts.

As it developed out of neo-Manichean theology, courtly love poetry focused on the barriers to love such that the real topic of courtly lyrics is not the object of desire, but the desire itself, and especially its perpetual deferral. The deflection of erotic desire heightens the pleasure of desire, such that what one desires is to go on desiring indefinitely. Such desire, or "passion" as Rougemont calls it, seeks unconsciously to perpetuate itself infinitely, so that a lover in the grip of passion seeks out the ultimate deferral of consummation: death. As such, courtly love and its descendents always includes an implicit death wish.

After explaining the connection between the Cathars and early Medieval poetry, Rougemont proceeds to explain how the cult of courtly love developed through subsequent literary periods. He moves at a quick pace through Dante, Petrarch, and other medieval authors. Chaucer, along with many later English authors, seems less prone to conventional courtly love, and Rougemont's argument that some of Milton's poetry exhibits Manichean tendencies is wholly unconvincing. When the argument moves into the rise of the novel, however, he is on firmer ground. In later chapters, he attempts to connect the valorization of passion in literature with the rise of Fascism in Europe--the book was originally written in the late 1930s--by showing how various dictators won their audiences by wooing them as lovers. It is a bold argument, and not entirely unconvincing. The last few chapters are dedicated to an exposition of Rougemont's answer to what he sees as a misplaced admiration for the passion of courtly love. He explains that the ideal of Christian marriage, an arbitrary commitment made without calculation of the potential for future happiness, is capable of eventually subduing the eros that produces passion and integrating it into a healthy order of loves.

Rougemont begins with the assumption that the obsession of Western Europe with romantic love is unparalleled in other cultures. That may or may not be true, but compared to the epics of Greece and Rome, and the sagas and legends of the Nordic peoples, it seems to Rougemont that the hero-lover of Medieval and Renaissance literatures came to displace almost entirely the hero-fighter of the earlier European literatures, and his books tries to explain how that shift happened. Whether or not one finds his explanation convincing, one has to admit that the phenomenon needs an explanation. The fact that most libraries and book stores devote far more shelf space to love stories than to war stories seems commonplace to us, but it would have seemed strange to the civilizations that produced Beowulf and the Iliad.

Rougemont has written a daring argument, and he has had many detractors. For one, he has been frequently criticized for throwing in his lot with those who set up an absolute division between eros (a selfish love) and agape (an altruistic love). For example, the late Avery Cardinal Dulles (in "Love, the Pope, and C.S. Lewis." First Things Jan. 2007. 20-24.) equated Rougemont's position with that of Anders Nygren, who argued that eros has no place whatsoever in Christian love. But in a 1941 review of the book, the Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden chided Rougemont for not being clearer about his views, saying, "I find his definition of Eros a little vague. He sometimes speaks as if he meant, which I am sure he does not, that Eros is of sexual origin and that there is a dualistic division between Agape and Eros rather than--what I am sure he believes--a dialectical relation." Auden was right, and Dulles was wrong, and in the second edition of the book (1956) Rougemont did clear up some of the ambiguities, but his early chapters still portray the relationship between eros and agape as more strongly oppositional than his conclusion might warrant.

As a work of literary criticism (and one of the book's attractions is that it crosses many disciplinary boundaries), the book succeeds in tracing some strains of the courtly love tradition into the modern novel, but readers should know that Rougemont was almost certainly wrong in his hypothesis that the Troubadors appropriated their poetic conventions from the Cathar sect. A more likely source now seems to be certain Arab poets. As a work of cultural criticism, the work is somewhat stronger, since it taps into psychological features of the European mind that not even Freud had guessed at. His observations about the nature of passion as a paradoxically self-inhibiting desire are formidable explanations of human psychology, whether or not he was right about the origins of Western culture's idealization of that passion. Rougemont is worth reading because he raises new and important questions, even if his answers are often wrong.

One of the most intriguing books of ideas of the century. Has influenced, among other, John Updike, who wrote about it extensively in a 'New Yorker' essay. Discusses the artificial barriers lovers erect to intensify their passion. A detailed examination of the cult of Courtly Love in the Middle Ages adds an interesting historical dimension.

DeRougemont claims in this classic that the modern notion of romantic love originated in medieval courtly love. He further argues that this medieval notion of romantic love cannot form a proper basis for Christian marriage.

The author traces the tradition of courtly love from the 12th century through the 19th century to modern day. He begins with the legend of Tristan and Isolde and notes the inescapable conflict between passion and marriage. Passion is grounded in an eros that is often spoken of by the poets. Such eros is implicitly selfish and finds its only consummation in death, which means that romantic love includes an unconscious death wish.

The selfishness of passion is at odds with the mature agape love found in Christian marriage. The author claims that his underlying belief is a phrase from Heraclitus, "opposites cooperate, and from their struggle emerges the most beautiful harmony." DeRougemont does not argue that passion should be eliminated from marriage; rather marriage cannot be founded upon passionate love alone.

Denis de Rougemont
Love in the Western World

(New York: Schoeken Books, 1990) (originally published 1940) 393 pages

Argues that romantic love is a cultural invention
of the Western world.
Romance is always temporary because it is based on
projections, misinformation, illusions, & fantasies.
And it is therefore incompatible with marriage.

If you would be interested in other books exploring romantic love,
search the Internet for: "The Best Books Critical of Romantic Love".

James Leonard Park, existential philosopher

It isn't until the very end of de Rougemont's exciting and bewildering genealogy of romantic (Romantic) love and eroticism that you realize his agenda, and by then of course you are completely sucked in. de Rougemont traces this line from its origin in the mysteries of Gnosticism and Manicheism up through the alleged heretical subversions of the original courtly poets and all the way into the many ridiculous myths of our own time.

(But wouldn't you say that de Rougemont is just substituting one ridiculous myth for another?)

Hey kid, you said it, not me