Lewis, de Rougemont, and Modern Scholarship of Courtly Love

Lewis and de Rougemont are sometimes dismissed wholly or partially from recent studies of Courtly Love on the basis that they were too willing to find simple causes for the complex event that was the Troubadours and their audience. To state it as simply as possible, both Lewis and de Rougemont characterized the invention of passionate love in the west as being the result of Christian ideals encountering still-pagan cultures, thus yielding a new hybrid of passion, idealization and sensuality that altogether constituted a new sentiment within the western mind. This hardly looks like a recipe for over-simplification if one takes into account the breadth of Lewis’s readings in medieval literature or de Rougemont’s humility in acknowledging the sometimes unknown gulf of causae standing between himself and the spiritual and emotional developments he was attempting to describe and diagnose in his Love in the Western World. Both authors are aware that there are a sea of “causes” at work behind the phenomena and developments they describe, but they are sometimes slighted for the big pictures that emerge from the minutiae of their more critical scholarly work.

Both de Rougemont and Lewis are well-known for drawing attention to the appearance of courtly love and in doing so defining some of the limits and tone of the academic discourse that followed, but often ignored is their full acknowledgment that no one cause could solely carry the weight of explaining the appearance. De Rougemont stated clearly that the “causes” which he focused on, specifically Catharism, were not textual, but socio-political; those that had shaped the landscape from which Courtly Love had emerged, rather than textually influencing the poets themselves.

Lewis also makes clear that “Ovid Misunderstood” and “Northern Influence” are, at best, possible contributing factors rather than monocephalous explanations for the mystery of the origins of fin’amor. Likewise for de Rougemont, his posited thesis about Catharism stands in such opposition to Aroux, Peladan and Otto Rahn that it can not only not be identified with the maximum thesis that the trobar clus was the “secret language of heresy,” but also that it cannot be identified with a even minimal version of the same. De Rougemont appealed to the widespread influence of Catharism and it’s anti-Christian elements as being a fundamental element of the motivations for the audience of troubadour activities, rather than the slanderous dismissal that he was presuming an occultic and esoteric explanation for what he well knew to be a complex social and artistic movement.

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.)