Abstract

The question of whether the phenomenon of passionate love is a natural phenomenon, as for naturalist psychologists, or rather a cultural product of Western civilization, was asked already by Nietzsche. This article deals with Denis de Rougemont’s essay L’amour et l’occident, in which the Swiss French intellectual answers the question decidedly in the sense of the second alternative. According to Rougement, passionate love finds its source in the movement of Catharism, which developed in Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Courtois love is expression of a transfigured love towards God combined with a gnostic disdain of the created world. The article also discusses the critiques that have been raised against Rougemont’s thesis, but emphasizes that Rougemont’s thesis has to be read at a higher level of explanatory abstraction than that of its critiques.