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This analysis—indeed, psychoanalysis—of the legend is but the center of an interwoven sequence of theses that in sum boldly blame the modern Occidental obsession with romantic love directly on Catharism, a neo-Manichaean heresy that, before being crushed by the Albigensian crusade,
flourished in twelfth-century Provence. Manichaeanism, denying the Christian doctrines of the Divine Creation and the Incarnation, radically opposes the realms of spirit and matter. The material world is evil. Man is a spirit imprisoned in the darkness of the flesh. His only escape is through asceticism and mystical “knowing.” Women are Devil’s lures designed to draw souls down into bodies; on the other hand, each man aspires toward a female Form of Light who is
his own true spirit
, resident in Heaven, aloof from the Hell of matter. Moreover, in some permutations of Dualist mythology the Mother of Christ becomes Maria Sophia,
sophia aeterna
, an Eternal Feminine that preëxisted material creation. “Bernard Gui, in his
Manuel de l’Inquisiteur
, shows that although the Cathars venerated the Blessed Virgin, she was not, in their belief, a woman of flesh and blood, the Mother of Jesus,
but their Church
.” From such doctrines, de Rougemont maintains in his most strenuously and carefully argued chapters, it is a very short step to the erotic rhetoric of the troubadours of Languedoc, and from there to courtly love, epithalamian mysticism, Héloise and Abelard, Tristan and Iseult, and all the romances, medieval and modern, that torment Western man with Gnostic longings.

De Rougemont personifies the ramifying influence of the troubadours as a love-myth, a Venus born of the foam of Eastern religions and imported into Europe, like Cleopatra smuggled in rugs, wrapped in a cult of chastity. The love-myth, simply, is the daughter of a creed that holds Creation in contempt. She stands in the same relation to fruitful marriage as does Dualism to the Christian Monism precariously hinged on the dogma of the God-man. Her essence is
passion itself
; her concern is not with the possession, through love, of another person but with the prolongation of the lover’s state of mind. Eros is allied with Thanatos rather than Agape; love becomes not a way of accepting and entering the world but a way of defying and escaping it. Iseult is the mythical prototype of the Unattainable Lady to whom the love-myth directs our adoration, diverting it from the attainable lady (in legal terms, our “wife”; in Christian terms, our “neighbor”) who is at our side. Passion-love feeds upon denial; hence Tristan and Iseult, alone together in the woods of Morois, place the “sword of chastity” between them, foreshadowing the equally artificial devices of the countless playwrights, novelists, and scenarists who so wearilessly have obstructed the natural union of lovers and whose pathetic inventions continue to propagate, all unwittingly, a heresy inimicable to marriage, social stability, and international peace.

Such a summary of
Love in the Western World
cannot do justice to the elegance and interest of the original. For over three hundred pages the book sustains an aphoristic crackle. The section wherein de Rougemont traces the love-myth’s progress through Western literature from Dante to Baudelaire is literary high adventure pursued with unflagging energy and assurance. The section discussing passion in politics and war opens with an insight—“inasmuch as our notion of love enfolds our notion of woman, it is linked with a theory of the
fruitfulness of suffering
which encourages or obscurely justifies in the recesses of the Western mind a liking for war”—that is worth a volume in itself. Unlike most accretions of learning and intelligence,
Love in the Western World
has the unity of an
idea
, an idea carried through a thousand details but ultimately single and simple, and an idea that, however surprising its route of arrival, strikes home. Love as we experience it
is
love for the Unattainable Lady, the Iseult who is “ever a stranger, the very essence of what is strange in woman and of all that is eternally fugitive, vanishing, and almost hostile in a fellow-being, that which indeed incites to pursuit, and rouses in the heart of a man who has fallen a prey to the myth an avidity for possession so much more delightful than possession itself. She is the woman-from-whom-one-is-parted; to possess her is to lose her.” There is even a weird congruence between our romantic dispositions and the strict terms of the Manichaean myth: a man in love, confronting his beloved, seems to be in the presence of
his own spirit
, his self translated into another mode of being, a Form of Light greeting him at the gate of salvation. A man in love ceases to fear death. In the chapter titled “Marrying Iseult?”—the question mark is intentional and may be taken as the capstone of M. de Rougemont’s entire discourse—a phrase identifies a man’s Iseult as “the woman … of his most intimate nostalgia.” The hint is provocative. While nostalgia does not create women, perhaps it does create Iseults. What is it that shines at us from Iseult’s face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed? What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven, forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia; the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under the pressure of libidinous desire, into the details of her person. Freud says she is our mother. But the images we hoard in wait for the woman who will seem to body them forth include the inhuman—a certain slant of sunshine, a
delicate flavor of dust, a kind of rasping tune that is reborn in her voice; they are nameless, these elusive glints of original goodness that a man’s memory stores toward an erotic commitment. Perhaps it is to the degree that the beloved crystallizes the lover’s past that she presents herself to him, alpha and omega, as his Fate.

However suggestive,
Love in the Western World
is imperfectly convincing. Its exposition of “mysteries” in the Tristan legend seems at times farfetched—nowhere more so than in the incident of the “sword of chastity” laid between the lovers, which de Rougement takes as the exemplar of those obstacles that passion-love, lacking external obstructions, imposes on itself. In the synoptic text collated by Joseph Bédier (translated into English by Hilaire Belloc), the relevant passage occurs after Tristan, who is living in the wood of Morois with Iseult and his servant Gorvenal, has returned from hunting:

King Mark, seeking to kill the lovers, enters the hut and finds them thus asleep.

A sunbeam falls on the white face of Iseult. Mark inserts his ermined gloves, which she lately gave him, into the crevice admitting the sunlight. He withdraws his ring from her finger, replaces it with one she gave him, replaces Tristan’s sword with his own, and leaves.

De Rougemont appears to accept King Mark’s reasoning that the sword between them proves chastity. Yet the chapter makes abundantly clear that they are not living chastely: “No lovers ever loved so much.” On this occasion, the heat of the day and Tristan’s weariness are emphasized. They keep on their clothes
implicitly as an exception
. They sleep so that “only their lips did not touch.” Iseult’s wedding ring is, symbolically, about to slip from her hand. Why the sword? The answer is given when Iseult’s cry wakens Tristan; he seizes it to defend them. The passage, read without presuppositions, describes a
fortuitous
escape from the King’s revenge. His interpretation of the sword is obviously mistaken. The proper focus of psychological explication is not the sword but the King’s mind; honor-bound to kill his wife, he seizes on a flimsy appearance of innocence to excuse himself from this dreadful duty. Superficially an anecdote of The Cuckold Deceived Again, the episode under the surface subtly portrays a triumph of merciful instinct over brutal custom. Neither level supports de Rougemont’s interpretation. The telling detail is the beam of sunlight that Mark shades from Iseult’s sleeping face, not the sword, which has been placed between the lovers not so much by Tristan as by the anonymous bard, as an excuse for the King to relent and as an excuse for the story to continue. Indeed, de Rougemont’s frequent complaint that in Western literature “happy love has no history” seems willfully naïve in regard to the necessities of narrative. The essence of a story is conflict—obstruction, in his term. Happy love,
unobstructed love, is the possibility that animates all romances; their plots turn on obstruction because they are plots. One might as well complain that “easy success has no history.” Too frequently de Rougemont seems to sight his metaphysical conclusions by gazing over the heads, as it were, of explanations closer to hand.

Again, the charge of narcissism that de Rougemont levels against lovers of the Tristan-and-Iseult type seems dubiously fair, for, as Freud in his essay on narcissism points out, “the human being has originally two sexual objects: himself and the woman who tends him.” That is, in feeling or making love, the lover shares in the glorification—the “over-estimation”—of the beloved; his own person becomes itself lovely. The selfish and altruistic threads in these emotions are surely inseparable. And the book creaks at its central joint—the connection between Catharism and courtly love. The evidence, however persuasively reinforced by analogy, remains circumstantial: courtly love and Catharism flourished side by side in southern France in the twelfth century. But no troubadour ever confessed to being a Cathar. In his search for “Manichaean esotericism” in later literature, de Rougemont verges on a kind of Rosicrucian absurdity. For example:

After such a titillating piece of scholarly gossip, de Rougemont unhesitatingly caps Romeo’s tomb soliloquy with this triumphant gloss—“Death’s
consolamentum
has sealed the one kind of marriage that Eros was ever able to wish for.”
Consolamentum
, it should be explained, is the specific term for a Gnostic sacrament.

To be fair, post-medieval writers breathed an atmosphere still saturated with notions now dispelled, and de Rougemont, in the revised edition, meets manfully the scholarly objections to his principal hypothesis. The nagging implausibility of the book has less to do with its details of evidence than with its ground of assumptions. De Rougemont seems
captivated by a rather Thomistic faith in the apparatus of cause-and-effect, and he religiously insists on the supremacy of mind over matter:

But might not this “encroachment of mind over instinct” be an instinctive response to the encroachments of matter, in the form of practical social law, upon the lawless libido? In relating, as cause to effect, the
sophia aeterna
of Dualist mysticism to the idealized woman to whom the troubadours addressed their songs, and in deriving modern man’s romantic malaise from the ubiquitous popularizations of the love-myth stemming from these songs, the author has possibly confused the fruit with the branch. Of course, literature and life interact, but de Rougemont, in his zeal to equate the doctrines of Rome with the decrees of Nature, seems to mislocate the
point de départ
of the interaction. In the French fashion, he claims too much for literature. His thesis at bottom grants “myths” a ghostly vitality independent of the men who create them, and ascribes to the mirror a magical shaping power.

Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love
is a somewhat unified collection of essays in which de Rougemont elaborates and clarifies his theory of “myths.” The book, titled in French
Comme Toi-Même
, begins with a long introductory chapter reframing the argument of
Love in the Western World
. Gnosticism is an attempt to make the “transition from Eros to the Spirit” without passing through the paradox of the Incarnation. Eroticism is “a lyrical or reflective transcendence of biological sexuality.” Love is “linked more than any other behavior, impulse, sentiment, or ambition to its literary, musical, or plastic expression; that is, to
language
in general, but in those forms most richly endowed with popular and suggestive turns, clichés, metaphors, and accepted symbols.” There exists an “eternal debate between a passionate Gnosticism and
the moderating wisdom of the Church, between the personal adventure and the collective orthodoxy, which the rising tide of Eros is now renewing among us.” The theatre of this debate is neither the mind nor the body but the third human constituent, which animates them both and which de Rougemont calls “the soul.” “The soul is the realm of the impulses that transcend the demands of instinct and conflict with the decrees of society … which counteract the ‘programs’ of physiological life recorded by our chains of chromosomes, which contradict the anticipations of economy and disturb our systems of rational and spiritual communications, in the manner of solar explosions.” These solar storms that ravage the hypothetical ether between mind and body are, of course, myths. “Between the sciences of the body and of the mind, between biology and theology, beyond the necessities of the species but this side of good and evil, without laws or dogmas, but not without symbols governing our emotive life, mythology performs its function—which is a function of the soul.” De Rougemont proposes to himself, then, a “mythanalysis of culture,” which will “make explicit religious elements generally repressed or quite simply unrealized.” The method, he states, is “exactly the inverse of Freud’s, but thereby comparable to his”; the myths are compared to the forces of Nature, which man can control only by understanding.