struggling with the world 175nate, cried out on the cross asking why he had been forsaken, how can
we aff ect a high- handed benevolence? Th e poisonous and pharisaical
teaching of the moral phi los o phers must be rejected by the Christian as
incompatible with the message of the redeemer.
In Christian theology, the sacramental bond between man and
woman, consummated in physical union, was also oft en invoked as an
image of the tie between God and humanity. Already for the ancient
Jews, in the prophetic period, the comparison of idolatry with adultery
had been widely drawn. Two views of love coexisted: the one suppress-
ing and the other affi rming an ideal beyond altruism.
Th e result is that within Christian teaching— and even more in Ju-
daism and in Islam— the contrast to altruism has failed clearly to be
made. Th e idea of love, as distinct from altruism, has regularly been
attributed to the infl uence of secular ideas deviating from the path of
salvation. But how can the sovereign role of altruism be reconciled with
the Christian faith?
When we turn to the secular ideas of love, we fi nd that the most in-
fl uential of these ideas disfi gure the idea of love. If the doctrine of love
is a suppressed orthodoxy, romanticism, in both the high and pop u lar
cultures of the societies penetrated by the struggle with the world, has
been the heresy that has expressed this doctrine only by distorting it.
Th e romantic conception of love is a truncated and perverted expres-
sion of the view of self and others that is intrinsic to the struggle with
the world.
Romanticism has been a distinctive form of consciousness, with a
par tic u lar history. It has also been an impulse at work in the subjective
life of all the societies that have been engulfed by the last few centuries
of world revolution. As a specifi c historical phenomenon it began with
the romantic movement of the early nineteenth century in the half-
Christian and half- pagan societies of the North Atlantic region. Th e
formulas of this way of thinking and of feeling have now been renewed
and disseminated throughout the world by the global pop u lar romantic
culture of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, high culture moved toward increasing degrees of skep-
ticism and irony about the availability of the two experiences that the
romantic consciousness has valued above all others: devotion to a true