Otto Rahn and the Impression of Having Touched the Heart of the Problem.

Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World has sometimes been credited with linking Catharism with Courtly Love, and doing so on an insufficient basis. In response to this, and the suppression that has resulted from the misreading of his thesis concerning the Cathars, de Rougemont pointed out the actual source for the theory in its extreme form was Otto Rahn – a bit of a wing nut.

“It all started in 1937 with the publication of La Croisade contre la Graal by Otto Rahn, a young German fascinated by Montsegur, where he thinks he recognizes the castle of the Grail, and who died mysteriously in an alpine waste near Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. His two extreme theses are taken from Eugene Aroux and the Sâr Péladan :

1) All troubadours were Cathars, all Cathars were troubadours’; and

2) courtly language was the secret language of heresy.

While this is untenable, it evokes an obscure evidence, the impression of having touched , albeit gropingly, the heart of the problem, and that somehow, in the fundamental reality of symbol, one burns. “(Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. pg. 329.)

Distancing himself from this extreme thesis while still acknowledging the appeal of such a mystical and unified “cause” for Courtly Love, de Rougemont outlines his more realistic form of this thesis which is much more than a simple downgraded form of the original. Rahn’s thesis outrightly, and without support, maintained that the trobar clus was the “secret language of heresy.” By noticing this and understanding its appeal, de Rougemont was poorly understood to have been in favor of this kind of foolhardy doctrinairian approach to social and literary history. However, rather than seeking simple cause, de Rougemont contended that Catharism and the Troubadours shared such a conspicuous concurrency geographically, chronologically, and socially that Troubadour activity cannot be fully understood without a consideration of the serious force that Catharism exerted upon its breeding grounds.

“This was as easy to cite in a gossip column as to refute in a specialized journal, without touching upon my real thesis, which remains: that troubadours and Cathars cannot be understood separately, outside of the broad religious – or psychosocial – phenomenon which includes them and carries them from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Anyone who claims that these two movements occurring at the same time and in the same regions, provinces and castles, exposed to the same sworn enemies, and both condemned by the Church, have ‘nothing in common’, must carry the burden of proof.” (Rougemont, Denis. Love in the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. pg. 331-332.)