An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

53. NATIONALISM, TRISTAN AND THE DEATH WISH

Denis de Rougemont put forward an original hypothesis of the origin of nationalism, which saw in nationalism the transfer to the Nation of a passion that he sometimes called Eros but which should perhaps more accurately be called Thanatos; for it is not sexual, nor a “sublimation” of sexuality, since its real object is not a woman nor anything in the created world. This passion he traced, in western history, to the emergence of the heresy of Catharism (otherwise known as Manichaeism or Albigensianism) in Southern France in the early twelfth century. The Catharist heretics deliberately cultivated a kind of refined eroticism, but not for overtly sexual or political ends – on the contrary, both sexual intercourse and war were considered to be evil, insofar as the whole created world was considered to be the work of the evil demiurge, - but in order to escape this world entirely and unite with the Light beyond the grave (which is why this passion could as well be called Thanatos).

This love of passionate Love received a symbolic expression in the poetry of the Troubadors and a “myth” expressed in such early romances as Tristan and Lancelot, in which, under the guise of an adulterous passion for an unattainable married lady, with whom union was not possible, and not even desired in this life, but only after death, the Catharist’s striving for union with the uncreated Light was represented.
The “sacred” symbolic poetry of the troubadors soon degenerated, in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, into profane love poetry and tragic dramas (Romeo and Juliet, Phèdre) and the first romantic novels, which instead of symbolizing an essentially religious and other-worldly ideal in the form of courtly love, represented unmistakably profane love under the guise of an irresistible, “divine” passion and with no taboo on sexual consummation. This was, of course, a complete reversal of the original intent of the myth. By the eighteenth century in France, even the “divinity” of this passion had been discarded, and in figures such as Don Juan or the Marquis de Sade only its supposed irresistibility and undoubted incompatibility with conventional Christian morality remained.
However, towards the end of the eighteenth century two events served to resurrect the original myth: the rise of German romanticism and the French revolution. German romanticism once again represented eros as a divine passion that could not be fulfilled in this life, but only in and through death.²³⁵ And German romanticism reached its climax in Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, in which the original myth is represented in something like its original religious force - and in music of an originality and power that transformed the later history of opera and music in general.
According to De Rougemont, “Tristan is far more profoundly and indisputably Manichaean than the Divine Comedy is Thomist…
“The drama opens with a monumental evocation of the powers that rule the world of day – the hate and pride, and the barbarous and sometimes even criminal violence, of feudal honour. Isolde wishes to avenge the affront she has suffered. The potion she gives to Tristan is intended to brIng about his death, but a death disallowed by Love, a death in accordance with the laws of day and of revenge – brutal, accidental, and devoid of mystical significance. The highest Minne, however, causes Brengain to make a mistake that can preserve Love. For the death-potion she substitutes the drink of initiation. Hence the one embrace which conjoins Tristan and Isolde as soon as they have drunk is the solitary kiss of the Catharist sacrament, the consolamentum of the Pure! From that moment the laws of day, hate, honour, and revenge, lose all power over their hearts. The initiated pair enter the nocturnal world of ecstatic release. And day, coming back with the royal procession and its discordant flourish of trumpets, is unable to recapture them. At the end of the ordeal which it compels them to undergo – this is their passion [“passion” derives from passio, meaning “suffering] – they have already foreseen the other death, the death that will alone fulfill their love.
“The second act is the passion song of souls imprisoned in material forms. When every obstacle has been overcome, and the lovers are alone together in the dark, carnal desire still stands between them. They are together, and yet they are two. The ‘und’ of Tristan und Isolde is there to indicate their duality as creatures. Here music alone can convey the certitude and substance of their twin nostalgia for one-ness; music alone can harmonize the plaint of the two voices, and make of it a single plaint in which there is already being sounded the reality of an ineffable other world of expectation. This is why the leitmotif of the love duet is already that of death.
“Once again day returns. The treacherous Melot wounds Tristan. But by now passion has triumphed. It wrests away the apparent victory of day. The wound through which life flows out is passion’s pledge of a supreme recovery – that recovery of which the dying Isolde sings once she has cast herself upon Tristan’s corpse in an ecstasy of the ‘highest bliss of being’.
“Initiation, passion, fatal fulfillment – the three mystic moments to which Wagner, with a genius for simplification, saw that he could reduce the three acts of the drama, express the profound significance of the myth, a significance kept out of sight even in the medieval legends by a host of epic and picturesque detail. Nevertheless, the art form adopted by Wagner renews the possibility of ‘misunderstanding’. The story of Tristan had now to be in the form of an opera… Even as the transgression of the rules of chaste love by the legendary lovers turned the poetic lay of the troubadors into the novel – so the powers of day, when brought forward in the first act, introduce struggle and duration, the elements of drama. But a play does not allow everything to be stated, for the religion of passion is ‘in essence lyrical’. Hence music alone is equal to conveying the transcendental interaction, the wildly contradictory and contrapuntal character of the passion of Darkness, which is the summons to uncreated Light.”²³⁶
It will be immediately apparent that the love of death is related to the revolutionary passion, even if for the revolutionaries the accent is on “death” rather than “love”, and even if there is no literal belief in a life beyond the grave. And in the French revolution, according to de Rougemont, there took place a transference of the myth into the realm of war, with the Nation in the place of the woman who can be united with only in death.
“At the end of the eighteenth century, there occurred the magnification of all that the Tristan myth, and later its literary substitutes, had been intended to contain. The middle-class nineteenth century witnessed the spread into the profane mind of a ‘death instinct’ which had long been repressed in the unconscious, or else directed at its source into the channels of an aristocratic art. And when the framework of society burst – under a pressure exerted from quite another quarter – the content of the myth poured out over everyday life. We were unable to understand this diluted elevation of love. We supposed it to be a new springtime of instinct, a revival of dionysiac forces which a so-called Christianity had persecuted…”²³⁷
“From a strictly military standpoint, what novelty was contributed by the Revolution? ‘An outburst of passion never before equalled’, is the answer given by Foch. According to him, the heresy of the old school had been to seek to make war into an exact science when it is really a terrible and passionate drama. Everybody knows, of course, that an explosion of sentimentality preceded and accompanied the Revolution, an event passionate far more than – in the strict sense of the word – political. With the murder of the king – a deed which in a primitive society would have had a sacred and ritualistic significance – the violence that had long been pinned down by the classical formality of warfare became once again something at once horrifying and alluring. It was the cult and blood-spilling mystery that gave rise to a new form of community – the Nation. And a Nation requires that passion shall be transferred to the level of the people as a whole. Actually, it is easier to feel that this happened then than to give an account of it. Every passion, it may be objected, presupposes the existence of two beings, and it is therefore difficult to see, if passion was taken over by a Nation, to whom the Nation then addressed itself. Let us remember, however, that the passion of love is at bottom narcissism, the lover’s self-magnification, far more than it is a relation with the beloved. Tristan wanted the branding of love more than he wanted the possession of Iseult. For he believed that the intense and devouring flame of passion would make him divine; and, as Wagner grasped, the equal of the world.
Eyes with joy are blinded…

I myself am the world. ²³⁸
Passion requires that the self shall become greater than all things, as solitary and powerful as God. Without knowing it, passion also requires that beyond its apotheosis death shall indeed be the end of all things.
“And nationalist ardour too is a self-elevation, a narcissistic love on the part of the collective Self… And what does the national passion require? The elevation of collective might can only lead to the following dilemma: either the triumph of imperialism – of the ambition to become the equal of the whole world – or the people next door strongly object, and there ensues war. Now it is to be noticed that a nation undergoing the early surges of its passion seldom recoils from war, even if that war must be hopeless. A nation thus unconsciously expresses a readiness to court the risk of death, and even to meet death, rather than surrender its passion. ‘Liberty or death’, the Jacobins yelled, at a time when the forces of the enemy seemed to be twenty times as strong as their own, and when therefore ‘liberty’ and ‘death’ were words very near to having one and the same meaning.
“Thus Nation and War are connected as Love and Death are connected. And from this point onwards nationalism has been the predominant factor in war. ‘Whoever writes upon strategy and tactics should confine himself to expounding a national strategy and tactics, for these alone can be of use to the nation for whom he writes.’ Thus General von der Goltz, a follower of Clausewitz. And Clausewitz constantly asserted that the Prussian theology of war must be based on the experience gained in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. The Battle of Valmy was a victory of passion over ‘exact science’. It was to the cry of ‘Long live the Nation!’ that the sans-culottes repulsed an allied army still bent on consolidating operations on ‘classic’ lines. It will be recalled that Goethe, after witnessing the battle, said: ‘On this field and on this day a new era begins in the history of the world.’ To this famous pronouncement Foch adds: ‘Truly enough a new era had begun, the era of national wars that are fought under no restraints whatever, because a nation throws all its resources into the struggle, because the aim of these wars is not to safeguard some dynastic claim, but to defeat or propagate philosophical ideas and intangible advantages, because these wars are staked upon feelings and passions, elemental forces never enlisted before.’”²³⁹
Of course, the readiness to die in battle for one’s nation did not begin only with the French Revolution. But the sheer ferocity of French revolutionary nationalism needs explanation. Whether de Rougemont’s explanation - in terms of a revival of the passion propelling the Catharist heresy that had lain latent in western civilization since its suppression in the thirteenth century - is convincing cannot be determined here. What we can say, however, is that insofar as this passion is directed as much against fellow-countrymen as against citizens of other nations, it cannot be said to be purely nationalistic. It would be more accurate to say that aggressive nationalism is a phase or aspect of the revolutionary passion as such, that aspect which it presents in relation to other nations.
Thus the revolution first presents itself to the people of its own nation in an internationalist form – the slogans of the “freedom, equality and brotherhood” of all people, the principles of universal human rights, etc. Then, having captured the collective of the nation by destroying or neutralizing those members of it that refuse to be possessed by its revolutionary spirit, it proceeds to the nationalist phase of its expression. The revolution is now the work of la grande nation; and all nations that do not want to submit to this Nation must be conquered or destroyed. For, as Metropolitan Anastasy writes: “The nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the individual man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same progression, as every passion becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in thousands and millions of souls.”²⁴⁰
The word “possessed” indicates the true nature of this passion – a demonic force that possesses men, which uses human passions but is different from them. De Rougement is right to emphasize the boundlessness of the passion, its egoism and its orientation, ultimately, to self-annihilation and death. But this mystical, religious nature of the passion, combined with its blasphemy, reveals its non-human, satanic origin – and the inadequacy of purely psychological explanations such as Berlin’s “collective humiliation”. It follows that nationalist passion, as opposed to healthy patriotism, cannot be assuaged by political or military success, as hunger is assuaged by food or thirst by drink. For satanic egoism and self-deification knows no bounds, and only grows with success. Nationalism can only be tamed by the instilling of the true faith into the national organism. Then national consciousness, instead of being distorted and inflamed in the passion of nationalism, will be transformed into the pure flame of patriotism, which loves the nation, not for its own sake, but as being the bearer of a higher principle, the principle of true religion…