Love in the Western World
"Denis de Rougemont in his book, Love in the Western World, claims that the repressive measures ostensibly successful in eliminating the Albigensians [heretical Gnostic Christian sect in 11th & 12th centuries], succeeded in driving some of these teachings underground, only to have them rise again as operative elements in the tradition of romantic love in Western civilization. The same ideal of platonic (ideal) love feeding on the romantic agony and exquisite anguish of forbidden or impossible love, and invariably ending in death, is an element of the Albigensian form of Gnosticism and persists still as characteristic of the tradition of romantic love in Western civilization. These same heresies can arise from our sarx, our sinful nature, and do not necessarily need the teachings of a defined, established heresy. Nevertheless, the fact remains that any literature of romantic love in the West since the twelfth century, from the tales of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Petrarch and Laura, and their subsequent parallels, until the 'naturalism' reaction in the twentieth century, contains many of the Docetic and Gnostic elements present in the Manichaeism of the twelfth century heresies. C.S. Lewis has also ably shown the religious roots of the romantic love tradition in Western civilization.
"The flight from any responsible 'incarnational' love is characteristic of the literature of romantic love. Hardly a single example of romance in married love exists in all of the Western romantic love tradition. Lovers scarcely know each other and are more in love with love than with each other. Death always intervenes before there is any significant chance for two people to know each other as they really are. Death, therefore, obscures the need for self-giving kind of love (agape) to supplement and save this romantic love (eros) from its essential preoccupation with self and its idealized projections. The end or destiny of romantic love as a religion is always death, either of the love or of the lovers. Thus death obscures for its adherents the essential self-centeredness and flight that is characteristic of romantic love. All seem to end in daggers, poison, or mutual suicide. The twentieth century has a rather sentimentalized version of this fatal end: marriage. ('O how we danced on the night we were wed....' Romantic love can last only until marriage.)
"It would be difficult to exaggerate the pain, suffering, and broken marriages of countless people who have been misled over the centuries into thinking that 'true' love is always some other, impossible, forbidden love. This love feeds the essential romantic agony, exquisite anguish, self-pity, and death (literal or symbolic, as in marriage seen as death) that characterizes 'true' love in eight hundred years of romantic tales. In contrast to the escape of Docetism, Christianity promises redemption and internal change that enables two people to love each other in all their concreteness."
-C. FitzSimons Allison, The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy, 63-64.
"The flight from any responsible 'incarnational' love is characteristic of the literature of romantic love. Hardly a single example of romance in married love exists in all of the Western romantic love tradition. Lovers scarcely know each other and are more in love with love than with each other. Death always intervenes before there is any significant chance for two people to know each other as they really are. Death, therefore, obscures the need for self-giving kind of love (agape) to supplement and save this romantic love (eros) from its essential preoccupation with self and its idealized projections. The end or destiny of romantic love as a religion is always death, either of the love or of the lovers. Thus death obscures for its adherents the essential self-centeredness and flight that is characteristic of romantic love. All seem to end in daggers, poison, or mutual suicide. The twentieth century has a rather sentimentalized version of this fatal end: marriage. ('O how we danced on the night we were wed....' Romantic love can last only until marriage.)
"It would be difficult to exaggerate the pain, suffering, and broken marriages of countless people who have been misled over the centuries into thinking that 'true' love is always some other, impossible, forbidden love. This love feeds the essential romantic agony, exquisite anguish, self-pity, and death (literal or symbolic, as in marriage seen as death) that characterizes 'true' love in eight hundred years of romantic tales. In contrast to the escape of Docetism, Christianity promises redemption and internal change that enables two people to love each other in all their concreteness."
-C. FitzSimons Allison, The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy, 63-64.