by John Updike
Whereas Barth admits that “By the miracle of foolishness it is possible to think of God as not existing. But only by this miracle. Anselm had certainly not reckoned with this.” There is, then, a difference between the modern and the medieval theologian—the theologian of crisis and the theologian without a sense of crisis. They are separated by nine centuries in which the miracle of disbelief has so often recurred that to call it a miracle seems an irony. The gap between credere and intelligere across which Anselm slung his syllogism has grown so broad that only Jahweh’s unappealable imperatives can span it: “God,” Barth says, “shatters every syllogism.” Several times Barth speaks of Anselm’s formula quo maius cogitari nequit as an “embargo,” as a Divine prohibition in the style of the First Commandment: “God is the One who manifests himself in the command not to imagine a greater than he.” This “embargo” is in fact on freedom of thought, “the most inward and most intimate area of freedom. Bene intelligere means: to know once and for all, as a real ox knows its master or a true ass its master’s stall.” Here Barth’s vocabulary and theology seem more Biblical than the Bible itself. The Christian believer, awaking from the medieval dream wherein Church and State, faith and science, thoughts and things seemed to merge, has been restored with a vengeance to his primitive desperation.
The understanding that faith seeks is, for Barth, fundamentally an understanding of what man and religion are not. Anselm’s proof—“a model piece of good, penetrating, and neat theology”—interests him in its rigorous negativity, its perfect independence of natural phenomena, and the “key” it holds for him is, possibly, that it proves nothing—probes, that is, the nothingness from which rises the cry for God. In “The Task of the Ministry,” Barth preached:
We cannot speak of God. The mystics, and we all in so far as we are mystics, have been wont to assert that what annihilates and enters into man, the Abyss into which he falls, the Darkness to which he surrenders himself, the No before which he stands is God; but this we are incapable of proving. The only part of our assertion of which we are certain, the only part we can prove, is that man is negatived, negated.
* Most of the quotations not specifically assigned are from the collection of addresses titled The Word of God and the Word of Man, available as a Harper Torchbook and quite the best introduction to Barth’s work. A brief life and full bibliography is provided by Georges Casalis in Portrait of Karl Barth (tr. Robert McAfee Brown. Doubleday, 1963).
† See Christ and Adam (Harper; 1957).
‡ Barth was an early and vigorous enemy of Nazism—“pure unreason, the product of madness and crime.” Teaching theology at Bonn in 1933, Barth (with Martin Niemöller and others) transformed the Evangelical Church in Germany into the “Confessing Church”—confessing, that is, the Barmen Confession, which Barth wrote and which begins with a condemnation of the Hitler-supported “German Christians.” In 1935 the Gestapo expelled Barth from Germany; he returned to his native city of Basel, on the German border, where he could oversee and with volumes of exhortation encourage the spiritual struggle against Nazism. In his foreword to Dogmatics in Outline, Barth describes his 1946 audience: “The audience consisted partly of theologians, but the larger part was of students from the other faculties. Most people in the Germany of to-day have in their own way and in their own place endured and survived much, almost beyond all measure. I noted the same in my Bonn lads. With their grave faces, which had still to learn how to smile again, they no less impressed me than I them, I who was an alien, the center of all sorts of gossip from old times. For me the situation will remain unforgettable. By a mere coincidence it was my fiftieth semester. And when it was past, my impression was that for me it was the best ever.”
TILLICH
MORALITY AND BEYOND, by Paul Tillich. 95 pp. Harper & Row, 1963.
This slim but dense entry in the Religious Perspective series consists of three lectures delivered by Professor Tillich at Dartmouth and two chapters lifted from an earlier book. Morality is defined as obedience to an unconditional imperative—“the demand to become actually what one is essentially and therefore potentially.” Our “essential nature” is equated with our “created nature,” though Divine Creation seems to be understood as little more than a metaphor. The myth of the Fall, by which traditional Christianity explained Man’s estrangement from his created nature, Tillich rather individually reads to mean that Adam had lost innocence before the temptation of Jehovah’s prohibition, and already stood on a boundary of “desire” between guilt and innocence. Moral law, though valuable as cumulative wisdom and as an inculcator of moral habit, is inferior to love, “the urge for participation in the other one,” which is “the ultimate principle of moral demands.” Only love, particularly in the form of self-transcending agape, “can transform itself according to the concrete demands of every individual and social situation without losing its eternity and dignity.” Tillich carries forward this somewhat diagrammatic exposition with admirable intelligence. The last two chapters, which discuss ethical systems in the context of history, are especially brilliant. Yet the net effect is one of ambiguity, even futility—as if the theologian were trying to revivify the Christian corpse with transfusions of Greek humanism, German metaphysics, and psychoanalytical theory. Terms like “grace” and “Will of God” walk through these pages as bloodless ghosts, transparent against the milky background of “beyond” and “being” that Tillich, God forbid, would confuse with the Christian faith.
MORE LOVE IN THE WESTERN WORLD
LOVE DECLARED: Essays on the Myths of Love, by Denis de Rougemont, translated from the French by Richard Howard. 235 pp. Pantheon, 1963.
Denis de Rougemont, the Swiss theologian and essayist who is presently director of the Centre Européen de la Culture, in Geneva, is best known in this country as the author of Love in the Western World, which was first published in France in 1939 and, considerably revised and augmented, again in 1954; a translation of the revised edition was published by Pantheon in 1956. The self-announced purpose of this famous book is “to describe the inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage.” It begins with a detailed examination of the legend of Tristan and Iseult, and in the inconsistencies of the narrative discovers a furtive conflict between two religions: an exoteric creed of feudal honor and fealty, and an esoteric creed of unlimited passion. Tristan and Iseult are, de Rougemont concludes, in love not with one another but with love itself, with their own being in love; “their unhappiness thus originates in a false reciprocity, which disguises a twin narcissism.” Hence their passion secretly wills its own frustrations and irresistibly seeks the bodily death that forever removes it from the qualifications of life, the disappointments and diminishments of actual possession. “Passionate love, the longing for what sears us and annihilates us in its triumph—there is the secret which Europe has never allowed to be given away; a secret it has always repressed—and preserved!”
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 o
f 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:
When Tristan came back, broken by the heat, he embraced the Queen.
“Friend, where have you been?”
“Hunting a hart,” he said, “that wearied me. I would lie down and sleep.”
So she lay down, and he, and between them Tristan put his naked sword. To their good fortune they had kept on their clothes. On the Queen’s finger was that ring of gold with emeralds set therein, which Mark had given her on her bridal day; but her hand was so wasted that the ring hardly held. Thus they slept, one of Tristan’s arms beneath the neck of his friend, the other stretched over her fair body, close together; only their lips did not touch.
King Mark, seeking to kill the lovers, enters the hut and finds them thus asleep.
Then he said to himself: “My God, I may not kill them. For all the time they have lived together in this wood, had it been with a mad love that they loved each other, would they have placed this sword between them? Does not all the world know that a naked sword separating two bodies is the proof and the guardian of chastity? If they loved each other with mad love, would they lie here so purely?”
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.
Then in her sleep a vision came to Iseult. She seemed to be in a great wood and two lions near her fought for her, and she gave a cry and woke, and the gloves fell upon her breast; and at the cry Tristan woke, and made to seize his sword, and saw by the golden hilt that it was the King’s.
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 willful
ly 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: