Systems and Debates

by Alain de Benoist

  As for Saint Jerome, he curses motherhood, this ‘tumefaction of the uterus’. On his part, Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, compares marriage to prostitution. More disillusioned, John Chrysostom642 writes: ‘Women are a punishment that one cannot escape, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable sin, a wound wrought by nature under the disguise of beauty’.

  In 585 CE, a debate was held at the Council of Macon643 to determine whether women have a soul of their own. Those convinced that a woman does indeed have one triumphed by a single vote. 1000 years later, in 1563, the Council of Trent644 issued the following declaration: ‘Whosoever claims that marriage is superior to virginity and celibacy […] shall be excommunicated’.

  Sexual freedom, which had mostly been accompanied by a natural sort of decency in Europe, was thus simultaneously rejected. No longer defining women as both wives and mothers, but solely as mothers, the Church proceeded to encourage adultery in an indirect fashion. In its 17th canon, the first Synod of Toledo645 allowed unmarried men who had taken on a mistress to receive holy communion. A sexual morality burdened with countless guilt-inducing prohibitions and provided by various ‘confessor manuals’ was spliced into marital life. Human sexual organs were granted different metaphysical dimensions, as love and pleasure found themselves utterly dissociated. Thomas Aquinas offers the following clarification: ‘One must touch their wife both cautiously and sternly, for fear of having pleasure unhinge her reason through overly lascivious tickling’.

  In parallel to this, the Church forbade itself, just like all believers, to be to curious ‘with regard to the Tree of Life’. In his Somma Teologica, Thomas Aquinas likens the copulatory function to the digestive one, content to have it take place in a blissful ignorance of biological processes. Everyone thus had access to the sacraments of marriage, the latter being no more than a matter of dogmatic conformity. Mr Cheverny notes: ‘As a result, not only did the lowliest runts, the dumbest and most wretched of beings enjoy the right to procreate, but they even had the obligation to do so, without anyone ever pondering the option of sterilisation, contraception or abortion’.

  He goes on to state that ‘despite being labelled natural by the theologian that enacts laws on its behalf, the Christian family was’ thus ‘nothing short of unreal: it was destined to become a rational being whose very nature is so indifferent and foreign to it that it could never avenge itself’.

  Within the historical and literary medieval sphere, however, one must distinguish between several influences, ranging from Christian ones to Celto-Germanic, Occitan and Islamic ones. During the 11th and 12th centuries, courtesy enjoyed great prosperity, having stemmed from the acknowledgement of an existing incompatibility between love and Christian marriage. It would, over time, experience mixed fortunes. Whereas chivalric literature proposed an aristocratic sort of eroticism, one that is rooted in a spiritual union of the sexes evading all temporal conventions, courtly literature (taken in its strictest possible meaning, and especially the Andalusian one) strived to act as the sublimation of adultery, almost always driven by a mindset of social contestation. (Far from singing the praise of adulterous relationships, the legend of Tristan and Isolde demonstrates the latter’s inevitable failure, as seen with both Chrétien de Troyes646 and Gottfried von Strassburg.)647

  Couples Are Self-Sufficient in Leading a Full and Complete Existence

  With Raimbaut d’Orange,648 one encounters the following verses:

  If women you desire to conquer,

  And upon you they seem to bestow honour,

  If distasteful or lacking their answers appear,

  To threaten them you must not fear;

  And if the answer they give is worse still,

  Strike them in the nose at will

  If cruel they are, give cruelty zest

  The more you mistreat them, the more you rest

  Simultaneously, one witnessed the emergence of strictly pagan themes within chivalric literature, themes which, under Christian garments of convenience (as the Lady becomes an avatar of the Madonna, the protector of men against demons), centred around a destiny that remained independent of one’s ‘good’ or ‘wicked’ actions, and especially around a feeling of love that lies beyond both good and evil.

  In this regard, the Lady acts as a diversion. By declaring his willingness to die for his love, the knight demonstrates that it is, once again, possible to sacrifice oneself in the name of a profane passion. The enchantment (Geis or ‘magical pact’) that ties him to his Lady allows him to accomplish deeds in utter disregard of all divine and human laws. He thus proclaims the rights of a passion justified by spiritual superiority. Aspiring to lead a full and complete existence together, the knight and his Lady lay claim to spiritual self-sufficiency. And it is eroticism that spiritualises the relations that develop between them.

  Mr Julien Cheverny writes: ‘It is in this respect that chivalric courtesy proves to be antichristian — by revealing itself to be angelic and undertaking to cement, beyond social classes and canonical laws, a union of two creatures, while bestowing privilege upon a couple that has no need of the Creator and is declared to be self-sufficient’.

  The Reign of Bourgeois Conjugality

  Hundreds of years went by, and soon the 18th century was upon the world. In the myth of Don Juan, Mr Cheverny detects a reversed symmetrical element and the logical complement to Tristan’s legend. It is no longer man that is ensorcelled by woman, but the woman who, in turn, is damned by her passion. ‘At the time when Balthasar Bekker649 proclaimed that people’s belief in the devil related to pagan superstition and was therefore expected to crumble in the face of reason, Satan secularised himself and proceeded to disguise himself as a Spanish lord. With Don Juan, it is a strong human spirit that sets out to combat the Holy Spirit, as love reverts to being a means of damning people’s souls, a tool that allows the creature to rebel against its creator’.

  In La nouvelle Héloïse,650 Rousseau attempts to reinvent both the prehistoric innocence and the lost paradise of universal love. It seems that this vision of things avoids any and all notion of original sin, but its innocent naivety is falsely ambiguous. It would eventually lead to the polygamic childishness of utopian socialists: woman would no longer be the mere mediator of history, the interpreter of individual sentiments in the face of the eternal sidereal ethers, the ‘original’ creature that Raymond Abellio would end up integrating into the temporal fabric of creation, but the co-ruler of the phalanstery.

  In France, a land where romantic love scarcely sets up home, people’s reliance on passions was soon superseded by a reliance on conventions. With Benjamin Constant, who followed in the footsteps of Mrs de Staël,651 marriage became a mere matter of social existence and familiar humanism.

  In the 19th century, God was apparently absent, although Christianity itself was very present indeed. The notion of evil was devalued in the name of ‘mankind’s progress’ and replaced by social conventions. Marriage became, once again, an entwining of egoisms. Spouses were partners, rarely acting as lovers. Thus came the triumph of bourgeois conjugality with its cumbersome chattering about the conflicts opposing love to reason and the endless variations in the trio that comprises the wife, the husband and the lover — a trio which Mr Cheverny has labelled ‘the holy trinity of monogamic marriage, whoredom and adultery’.

  The result is, at best, embodied by Balzac,652 whose Human Comedy establishes ‘the inventory and grammar of bourgeois matrimony’, but also by a ‘psychology’ worthy of starry-eyed girls and boulevard comedies. It is a time of ‘little women’ and ‘tarts’: those among the young who came from good families ‘sowed their wild oats’ before getting back in line. ‘By entering matrimony, the male puts an end to his previous behaviour, and the female avoids the shame of celibacy by making herself economically dependent on her husband’.

  As entering into a marriage of convenience became more or less a rule (with the aid of egalita
rianism), mistresses and lovers were given equal treatment to that of a conventional spouse, a development which not even the aristocrats that enjoyed the companionship of swarms of favourites653 during the Old Regime could ever have imagined. Instituted by the Revolution and then abolished by the Restauration, divorce would resurface under the Naquet law.654

  Fortunately, along came Stendhal. Despising the triangular dialectic of bourgeois conjugality, he did not shrink from founding the union of couples upon heroic and feverish love. Even better: ‘However liberal he may have been, he felt compelled to note that the energy of love was inversely proportional to the progress introduced by the Enlightenment, that women had been undergoing moral sterilisation in countries influenced by the principles of 1789 and that passion dwindled whenever freedom triumphed and civilisation was altered’.

  By guillotining the King, the Revolution had slaughtered the Father. The latter having vanished, only the Mother remained, sometimes honoured as the redeemer of mankind and sometimes as the eternal feminine, a seductress or, paradoxically, a goddess of reason.

  This is where the ambiguous Anti-Madonna surfaces. Although she does indeed allow man to attain a higher level of humanity, the fact remains that the more mankind rises, the deeper it ultimately falls. The Anti-Madonna is the grand-daughter of both Eve and Lilith. The myth, however, takes on a different meaning this time around. Emphasis is placed on the notion of fate, rather than that of sin. As for the flesh, it is not targeted with scorn. Additionally, the latent misogyny is coupled with a passionate sort of exaltation, one that celebrates both man’s strength and his tragic weakness, even more so than feminine perversity. In the cinematic field, this attitude will give rise to films such as Erich von Stroheim’s Greed and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, and in literature to the mesmerising and terrible figure of Anne-Marie in Lucien Rebatet’s Les deux étendards.655

  Simultaneously, the Anti-Madonna proclaimed anew the joint prerogatives of ingeniousness and passion. Cosima, who was Liszt’s656 daughter and Wagner’s wife, symbolises ‘a woman’s right to ensure that her love-based choice of a superior man and her volition to express certain values both prevail’ (Nietzsche would pass away in a state of despair for having failed to be loved by her).

  The Church responded to the quasi-worship of woman with its own religion of the Virgin. The entire 19th century was marked by a resurgence of ‘Mariolatry’, interspersed with ‘apparitions’ during which ecstatic teenage girls describe various ‘miracles’. As a result, two great Marian dogmas were adopted.

  There are some misogynous theoreticians as well. Hegel serves as a good example of this, since he excludes women from participating in the governance of nations and affirms that ‘they do not act in accordance with the requirements of universality, but in harmony with accidental penchants and opinions’ (as stated in The Philosophy of Law).

  Towards a Novel Type of Conformism

  Finally, there is Karl Marx, who adopted the major themes of scriptural eschatology by secularising them. According to him, men are ‘equal, for they are the same as long as one disregards the tiny differences between them’. His struggle against patriarchy results in an undifferentiation of the sexes. Mr Cheverny writes: ‘By what virtue and what right could Marx ever grasp the essence of the relationship that ties a man to a woman, when he has reduced it to a relation between two equal and similar beings that an allegedly meaningful history will free from all alienations by gradually erasing one’s domination over the other’?

  Marx, in fact, remains rather silent with regard to the nature of sexual relations in the future Marxist society. Convinced that man is born good, he relies upon the latter to conduct the reinvention of his own sexuality once he has reclaimed the fullness of his being and all social ‘contradictions’ have been eliminated.

  Modern communism could only lead to a new type of conformism. Mr Julien Cheverny writes: ‘Soviet communism targets Tristan and Don Juan with equal repugnance; it rejects both feminism and femininity in the name of a theory centred around the fraternal solidarity of the sexes, a theory that drives it to devise the alignment of women with men. Displaying a preference for the family and household over the couple and excluding eroticism (which is conveniently labelled libertarian or reactionary), Soviet communism repudiates both China’s desexualising puritanism and the western temptations of popular democracies, opting to follow the middle path of petty-bourgeois conformism. […] Catholicism sees women as mothers; as for the communists in Latin countries, they will readily perceive a woman as a worker and a mother but always avoid acknowledging her as a lover or a wife’.

  Ever since the 20th century, it is pluralism that has been on the daily menu, more so than ever before: in a most disorganised fashion, we are drifting further and further from the Pauline conception of sexuality. D. H. Lawrence’s657 Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a pagan response to English puritanism, one in which the WLM will be quick to detect a novel form of ‘phallocracy’. Through Mounier,658 we witness the birth of ‘Christian-academic’ love; with Teilhard, it is ‘Trans-Christian love’ that prevails; as for Denis de Rougemont,659 he proposes a neo-chivalric kind of love. And while Paul Ricoeur660 campaigns for the reclaiming of Eros at the hands of Agape, eroticism evades the authority of priests and falls straight into the hands of psychiatrists, who have taken over.

  The role played by Freud is, indeed, highly ambiguous. Having rediscovered the lost continent of desire, he triggered the strong resurgence of Dionysus and Pan. Simultaneously, however, he laid the foundations for a new kind of guilt. In an effort to eradicate ‘taboos’, he institutionalised the latter by means of a simplistic theory. He proceeded to replace the Ten Commandments with an entire catalogue of perversions. Our bad conscience re-emerges through a false means of self-liberation. Freud shifts the Hinterwelt taboo towards a self-ignoring consciousness that undertakes, in turn, to play the part of an intermediary in relation to a tyrant that has now been interiorised.

  Rendered unidimensional through the gradual suppression of actual experience, our permissive society is hyper-eroticised without, however, being erotic. Exhibitionism has taken over from taboos, with the doubly paradoxical result of soulless pleasure and the reinstatement of love as a spiritual matter.

  In his essay on the Sociology of sexuality (Gallimard, 1972), Helmut Schelsky perceives non-selective sexuality as a definite sign of decline. He writes: ‘The absence of norms corresponds to a state of biological decadence. […] A disorderly sexual promiscuity corresponds to a factor of precivilisation’.

  Mr Cheverny makes the following observation: ‘The more a permissive society abolishes the forbidden, the more it mutilates the erotic; when leading people towards anti-love, it devalues sex and turns it into mere antics; when leading to courtesy, it devalues sex just as much, reducing it to a replacement tool or a fifth wheel. A whore will readily present her sex to her clients but keep her mouth inaccessible. At the end of the 20th century, the Western woman shall willingly grant men access to both her sex and her mouth, while striving to prevent all access to her soul. It is not so much by offering her body that she will express her passion, but rather by exclusively reserving her indulgences and tenderness for a single man to enjoy. Never again shall the male know whether his woman has deceived him as much as he himself is well aware to have done. He will have learnt that he is being flouted, whether intentionally or not, and that only inferiority awaits men in the false equality that has been established between them and their women’.

  Ambiguous Love

  The Church and the Party are now taking heed of their own failure; a failure that sprawls across all domains, but particularly concerns Eros. From both of their perspectives, the only ‘acceptable’ form of eroticism is one that abides by a unique vision of things. In both cases, we encounter a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the fact that the very definition of ‘paradise’ could actually be different for each one of us, a refusal that leaves the individual with only one choice: decidin
g between anti-love (to lavishly indulge in pleasure without ever tasting the joys of the soul) and the embracement of mental secession in the face of an impotent society.

  What is ‘the aware individual who deems himself free of all Judeo-Christian and Marxist morals’ to do, then? By turning to biology, eugenics and ethology, Mr Cheverny provides us with an answer.

  Quoting the words of Konrad Lorenz (‘There is no love without aggressiveness’), he insists on the necessity to introduce a dialectic of the sexes, one that is rooted in the specificity of masculine and feminine characteristics. He remarks that for both animals and man, the ‘natural, immediate and necessary relation’ mentioned by Marx ‘will only correspond to the redeployment of an aggressiveness which, far from being pathological and abnormal, will prove to be necessary for our species and act as a decisive rule in the relation of the sexes. Wherever the competition between fellowmen finds itself attenuated, there shall be no couples, as is the case among rats. Wherever it is sharpened, the requirements of both coupling and courtesy rituals shall reclaim their full meaning, as seen among geese and wolves’.