“It is remarkable that, formed within a Christian universe where everything invited it—facing the man of earthly pleasure—to embody the final power that seizes him in a grandiose, spiritually rich presence, the myth should have made of this image of transcendence something cold, empty, terrifying to be sure, but terrifying through its coldness and its empty unreality.” (Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (The Infinite Conversation), Gallimard, 1960, p. 283).
Infidelity has its literary myth: that of Don Juan, born around 1620 in the Spain of the Golden Age and the Inquisition. Now, the extraordinary fortune of this myth brings to light the profound ambivalence of the representations of infidelity in the West: the condemnation of the unfaithful one is never far from indulgence, nor his damnation from his apotheosis. The hypothesis we should like to put to the test here is that this ambivalence is profoundly Christian and that it refers, in the last instance, to the religious foundations of modern culture.
In Which We Gauge the Efforts Deployed to Save an Unfaithful Man
Don Juan is unfaithful, that is understood: to God, to his duties, to women, but in infinitely variable proportions and according to an infinitely variable hierarchy.
Infidelity to God? But the Abuseur de Séville (The Trickster of Seville)1 is no atheist or freethinker; he would even be rather too confident in Grace. Assured that a last-minute repentance cannot be refused by the God of Love, he speculates on the infinite indulgence of Heaven. Now, when he finally understands that the Statue of the Commander is dragging him down to Hell and he asks for “a confessor,” the verdict of God’s emissary is final: “You repent too late!” So hard to admit for a modern Christian conscience, the sentence is nonetheless perfectly coherent: the sinner’s repentance has no value if it is merely the outcome of a premeditated ruse; damned is he who, not content with having tricked men, has tried to trick God; he who has let a thousand occasions of being judged according to Grace go by will be judged according to Justice. A generation later, Molière’s Don Juan is himself a true unbeliever, “a madman, a dog, a Devil, a Turk, a heretic, who believes in neither Heaven, nor Hell, nor werewolf” (I, 1). His immorality may appear as the consequence of his atheism. A troubling reversibility of the theological signification of the myth: to believe blindly in God’s mercy leads Tirso de Molina’s Abuseur to errings comparable to those of Molière’s libertine. The feeling of impunity can rest upon faith in the unconditional Love of God just as well as upon unbelief.
Is it in amorous infidelity that we shall find the secret of donjuanism? Yet, contrary to what popular memory may have retained, it is only one element among many others, and not necessarily the most serious, of donjuanism: the faults committed against honor, against society, against the king—and of course against God—rival and surpass the sexual crimes. If Don Juan is indeed an image of the unfaithful one, he is, at least originally, only incidentally unfaithful to women: he is first of all unfaithful to his name. The Abuseur de Séville is that “man without a name” who is no longer attached to any symbolic order: he is unfaithful to women only because he is, beforehand, a stranger to the allegiances on which human life rests. In the same way, the “great lord, wicked man” refuses to pay his debts2, all his debts: economic (M. Dimanche), conjugal (Elvire), familial and social (Dom Louis).
That amorous infidelity should finally have prevailed in the becoming of the myth is, however, in no way fortuitous. It is first of all that the sexual question is at the crossroads of all the problematics of the myth: that of the religious order (the sacramental value of marriage was reaffirmed by the Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation), of the social order (the donjuanesque charivari muddles the anthropological laws of the exchange of women, compromises alliances, threatens genealogies), and of the intimate order (the question of individual happiness). It is also, as we shall see, that therein is disclosed all the ambiguity of the relation to the body and to desire in a Christian culture.
Now, from 1620 to the Romantics, the tendency, discernible as early as Molière’s work, is one of a rehabilitation of the figure of the unfaithful seducer, if not of infidelity itself. Tirso’s Abuseur was a vulgar pleasure-seeker: he aimed less to seduce than to possess, and less still to possess than to make sport of women’s honor by revealing their frivolity. Molière’s libertine is of an altogether different mettle: he has passed from the stage of the indiscriminate practice of debauchery to the aestheticization of conquest, and from empirical infidelity to a moral, even philosophical, legitimation of inconstancy. In the famous paradoxical eulogy that marks his entrance (“What, you would have one bind oneself to remain with the first object that takes us […]?”), faithfulness to one woman is denounced as an injustice done to all the others (an altruistic argument!); and, since possession extinguishes desire (“once one is master of it, there is nothing more to say or to wish,” I, 2), as the surest way of burying oneself alive. In Don Juan’s specious yet subtle line of argument, infidelity is thus justified by faithfulness to oneself, that is, to one’s desire. The betrayal of promises is not an enjoyment in itself (as in Tirso’s “Abuseur”); it is the expression of a non-negotiable attachment to one’s own desires: “Don Juan is, par excellence, the unfaithful one, he who respects no faith. His only fidelity is toward the contract he has made with himself (against all social contracts) and which he will honor to the very end”3. Certainly, Don Juan lies when he promises eternal love, but this lie is made against the ground of an authentic desiring impulse: desire itself does not lie. As J. Guicharnaud writes, “the exaggeration of the amorous transport does not conceal the opposite of love, but another form of love than the one normally admitted. Don Juan promises marriage, and he marries. He tells the girls they are beautiful, and they are, or at least he thinks so. He promises them an escape, and he gives it to them. […] He has a kind of sincerity of the instant. Less than a lie, his trap is made of an omission: he omits to say that he does not guarantee the morrow.”4
A paradoxical sincerity of Don Juan, in which shameless lie and refusal to feign are inextricably mingled. Here a decisive axiological reversal takes place, at the term of which infidelity is no longer envisaged only as a deficiency, but also as the ineluctable consequence of a hedonist ethics, whose modern resonances need not be underscored.
What is still placed, in Molière, under an equivocal light (his Don Juan oscillates, according to the scenes and the stagings, between dignity and ridicule, the sublime and the odious), the Romantics will draw out to all its consequences, making of donjuanism, to borrow Camille Dumoulié’s formula, the incarnation of a “heroism of desire.” Beginning with Mozart’s opera, but above all with the interpretation Hoffmann gives of it in a fantastic tale of 1813, Don Juan is no longer a mere delinquent, but a being of exception, a superior nature, in quest of the absolute. Even “his barbarous appetite” must be considered as the misguided expression of a thirst for eternity. The theology of Grace is replaced by a metaphysics of desire, the moral exemplum by a meditation on the bond between carnal immanence and aspiration to the infinite. The two responses the Romantic century will propose all go in the direction of an exaltation of “the unfaithful one.” There will be explicitly Christian rehabilitations: either through the representation of a spectacular repentance (Mérimée, Les Âmes du purgatoire (The Souls of Purgatory)), or through the intervention of a savior-woman (Alexandre Dumas fils, La Chute d’un Ange (The Fall of an Angel), second version). There will be, conversely, pagan self-justifications: despite his final failure, Lenau’s Don Juan (1848) is the pantheist bard of a Desire presented as the triumphant affirmation of the vital instinct, in an already Nietzschean contempt for the Christian God. Not only is infidelity there claimed as a right, but it is presented as a fatality, a universal law that only a naïve idealism could contest: every wife, in giving herself to her husband, “loves an image from the world of dreams, and whoever she may hold in her arms, he is other than she believes him to be,” so that “even the legitimate ravishment of marriage is an adultery”5. Psychological analysis is here, then, in the service of a moral and ontological justification of infidelity.
In any case, Christian or anti-Christian, whether the hero is saved or damned, all the Romantic versions of the myth will agree in recognizing grandeur in Don Juan, and therefore in granting him an elective destiny. At the same time, Goethe saved Faust, despite his pact with the devil, because he had striven to attain the absolute, drawn upward by “the eternal feminine.” Theologically or philosophically, morally or aesthetically, Don Juan must be saved.
But why does it appear so necessary, and all in all so easy, to save Don Juan, to wrest him from opprobrium, to remove him from mediocrity, to find him likeable and sometimes even admirable? It would certainly be easy to see therein the mere effect of an evolution of mentalities: what is there in common between a monk of strict Catholic obedience and Romantic authors fascinated by every manifestation of the exception? This historicist vision does not suffice, however. The evolution of the myth is wholly indexed neither to the writers’ opinions nor to the spirit of the times. The ambivalence is in fact present from the very origin of the work and is discernible in the relation that establishes itself between Don Juan and the Law that chastises him: not only does the confrontation with the Commander produce, from the origin of the myth, a relative heroization of the unfaithful one, but the instance charged with embodying the divine Law appears therein as partially delegitimized.
It is not the extraordinary character of his crimes that justifies the divine intervention; rather, it is the supernatural chastisement that retroactively confers grandeur upon Don Juan’s crimes. The structure of the myth, which requires that the seducer be carried off to Hell by an animated Statue, leads nolens volens to giving him a stature of exception: Don Juan is the one who sets the stone in motion, the one who has forced heaven to descend to earth. To punish the unfaithful one, the divinity has had to demean itself to the rank of a Statue: which one, the divinity or Don Juan, has been raised or lowered? Man and God confront one another neither entirely in heaven nor entirely on earth, but in a middle, intermediary zone, where man is a little more than man and God a little less than God. What is already true in the play by Tirso de Molina (although the triumph of the Statue seems complete there), is more so in Molière, who gives the character, in his last moments, an aristocratic and heroic posture. The height of obduracy is also the summit of courage and of faithfulness to oneself: “No, no, it shall not be said, whatever happens, that I am capable of repenting!” The Abuseur de Séville, for his part, had asked for a confessor; Mozart’s Don Giovanni, later, will retain the lesson of freedom of his Molièresque ancestor through the three “No”s addressed to the “old conceited fool.”
There is more. It is not remarked often enough that the Commander, at the end of the work, is swallowed up along with Don Juan—leaving alone on the stage the valet who will have to bear witness to the prodigy—as if the true place of this envoy of God, though enlightened by Grace, were in Hell with the one he punishes. An over-interpretation? Nothing is less certain: is the terrifying statue not, at bottom, the image of an infernal Justice? When, in Tirso’s work, it invites Don Juan to dine, it is to make him consume the meal of the damned, as if it were at home in hell. The very appearance of the Statue is made to arouse dread more than to inspire respect: the divine absolute presents itself in the singular form of a monstrous effigy6; the law of God is associated with a macabre representation.
To explain this paradox, Camille Dumoulié appeals to the opposition between “symbolic father” and “imaginary father.” Don Juan is a myth inseparable from modern times in that it marks a crisis of values and of the idea of Law, hence also of the idea of God. This crisis manifests itself notably in the devaluation of the fathers, who come out profoundly diminished, even humiliated, from the works of Tirso or Molière. This rejection of the symbolic Father engenders an unconscious guilt and “the humiliated father comes back to take his revenge”; the repressed Law, “impossible to think,” “returns under the species of a petrified law”7. But this splitting can only be fully understood, we shall try to show, within a theological-cultural landscape delimited by Christianity. Let us note for now that the Commander is also this image of a Law that has the bounded rigidity of stone; writing in stone is also, Julia Kristeva reminds us, the “stereotype”8, that frozen truth against which Don Juan sets the vivifying force of his desire.
Thus, independently even of the religious and moral convictions of the playwrights, the structure of the myth of Don Juan contributes to giving the figure of Evil a more inviting face than the figure of Good, to giving the divine values a stony majesty that may certainly inspire terror, but in no case sympathy. The accomplishment of divine Justice merges with a death-bearing scenography, whereas the sin of seduction is also the seduction of sin. The myth of Don Juan is a myth that, from the origin, places infidelity on the side of life and morality on the side of death, infidelity on the side of youth and beauty, the Law on the side of senescence and ugliness9.
Such is the founding ambiguity: it is certainly necessary that Don Juan be chastised, that he be a monstrous exception, and that the Law of the father be restored; but when the myth comes to restore in fine the paternal order, it is in the hideous form of a “father” who is now nothing more than the incarnation of a petrified law—a Law that, perhaps, has no more than the appearance of legitimacy.
Now, and this is what we should like to show through a few suggestions, if this model has fascinated, it is because it is inscribed deep within the Christian relation to the Law.
In Which We Attempt a Cavalier Archaeology of Infidelity with Regard to Christianity
Christianity as a Model of Paradoxical Fidelity
What did Christ mean when he said he had come to “fulfill” the Law and not to “abolish” it (Matthew 5:17)? If one admits that Christianity begins less with Jesus than with the theology of Saint Paul, in what way can one maintain that the “Christian revolution” radically transforms the relation to fidelity? By defining, against the ancient Law of “justice,” a Law of “grace” embodied by Christ, by opposing to the text of the Law the life of Christ, to the Temple the body of Christ, to the letter of the Law the spirit of the Law, Pauline theology durably problematized the question of fidelity. Saint Paul engages the new religion in an extremely complex, but never truly completed, process, which consists not so much—as in Judaism—in negotiating the applications of the Law, as in ruling upon it, in attempting to circumscribe the limits of its validity. Christianity determined, for a long time, a wavering in the relation to the Law that will mark European culture with its imprint, according to models that one might cavalierly summarize thus: — the idea that the Law is perfect, but that its literal observance is impossible, and that it is therefore fitting to substitute another for it that keeps its spirit while evacuating its letter; — the idea that the Law is good but unfinished, and that it is fitting to complete it, the better to fulfill it; — the idea that the ancient Law is obsolete, that its observance is henceforth devoid of meaning if it is not situated within the christic horizon10.
If Christianity cannot, in all rigor, deny the divine origin of the Law, it can therefore relativize it in a thousand ways. For a Christian conscience, either it is necessary to be unfaithful to the ancient Law the better to devote oneself to the new Law; or adherence to the new Law is understood as the height of fidelity, to the point that the accusation of infidelity can be turned back against Jewish legalism (since the will to brace oneself against the ancient Law will be understood as a misreading of what the true divine intention is). Christian identity poses a unique problem, for it implies an infidelity toward a tradition whose divine origin cannot be contested (since its own truth is founded therein), but which demands to be renewed, even entirely recast. This mental revolution, moreover, is inscribed within a new temporal axis, since the line of fracture between Judaism and Christianity also overlaps with the opposition between the old and the new (Old and New Covenant, Old and New Testament), which imposes the idea that what is true at one time is no longer so at another.
Certainly, Christianity did not fail, over the course of its history, to sediment in its turn into tradition and to combat every manifestation of deviance. But one finds, in Marcel Gauchet, the plausible hypothesis that the virulence of Christian (notably Catholic) dogmatism is proportional to the vertiginous hermeneutic openness aroused by belief in the Incarnation—which makes of Christianity, at the same time as a religion of dogma, a religion of heresy. One must therefore distinguish rigorously here the Christian religion in the strict sense from the secular decantation that has never ceased to accompany it like its shadow, and which issues from the same theological matrix. Within the genetic code of Christianity lies the anticipated legitimation of a contestation of traditional authority through renewed interpretations of the divine message. It rests at once on the example of Christ (whose death is interpreted as the price of a dissidence) and on the mutation of the regime of the sacred, which substitutes for scriptural fidelity and orthopraxy a faith in an event presented under the sign of mystery. It is in fact one of the singularities of Christianity that “the relation to the divine has ceased to appear as a relation to a law”11. Recentered on the christic event rather than on the moral, practical, and juridical prescriptions which, in Judaism or Islam, form the constraining and more or less immutable framework of religious existence12, the new faith constitutes itself, unbeknownst to itself, to take up Marcel Gauchet’s thesis, as the “religion of the exit from religion”13: infidelity to Christianity is thus programmed by Christianity itself.
The Christian Unconscious: The Denial of the Law?
This model of faithful infidelity or of infidel fidelity, which constitutes one of the key elements of the Christian (and more broadly Western) relation to tradition, can be further specified and complexified by the introduction of a parameter one would willingly designate by the term Christian unconscious.
Saint Paul does not content himself with questioning the conditions of perpetuity of a divine Law; it is easy to discern in his writings an ambivalent relation to the Law as such. In famous pages of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle expounds that the love of the Law is impossible and that the law “makes sin known.” “The paradox is therefore there,” comments Rémi Brague: “the law has two slopes. On the one hand, it is holy, just, and good. […] On the other hand, the law makes sin abound (Romans 5:20). It even arouses covetousness: ‘I would not have known covetousness if the law had not said: thou shalt not covet.’”14
One need not push very far to go so far as to flush out, in the founder of Christianity, an indictment of the Law and, in the “all is permitted” of the First Epistle to the Corinthians—which Saint Augustine will later gloss with his “Love and do what you will” (dilige et quod vis fac)—the will to be rid once and for all of a Law thought of as a burden15. There is, in other words, an anomic slope in Paulinism, a tendency that works (right up to our own day) within Christianity, whose aim would be the abolition of all law in favor of a salvation thought under the unconditioned regime of love. In this sense, the Marcionite heresy, advocating a pure and simple rupture with the Jewish Law, although it was finally rejected and combated by the Church, “could lay claim to an extremist interpretation of Saint Paul’s thought,” which sees in the “law of Moses” “the work of the evil demiurge whom the Gnostics make the creator of the world, and not of the good God who transcends it”16. Marcionism, more than a superseded heresy, is a permanent temptation at the heart of Christian identity, but more generally at the heart of modernity17.
Is this indictment of the Law not, implicitly, that of the Father who is its origin? If Christianity cannot formulate this resentment against the Father and against his Law, it can be deciphered between the lines of the christological imaginary. Such, at any rate, is the thesis of Erich Fromm, combining psychoanalytic anthropology and social analysis:
“A man is raised to the dignity of a god; he is adopted by God. […] Here we have the old myth of the rebellion of the son, an expression of the hostile impulses toward the father-god. […] The first adherents of Christianity […] intensely hated the authorities that confronted them with a ‘paternal’ power: the priests, the scholars, the aristocrats […] who, in their emotional universe, played the role of the severe, prohibiting, threatening, tormenting father; they hated them as they must equally have hated that God who was the ally of their oppressors and who let them suffer and be oppressed. […] Consciously, they did not dare attack the paternal God; their conscious hatred was reserved for the authorities, it did not reach the haughty figure of the father, the divine being himself. But the unconscious hostility toward the divine father found its expression in the fantasy of Christ. They placed a man beside God and made him the co-prince, with God the father. This man who had become a god and with whom they could identify as humans represented their oedipal wishes […]. This belief in the elevation of a man to the dignity of a god was thus the expression of an unconscious desire to eliminate the divine father.”18
Envisaged thus, the great Christian narrative would be a family narrative: eviction of the real father (Joseph) in favor of a symbolic father (God), putting to death of the rebel son, larval substitution of the cult of the Son for the cult of the Father—a dethronement more or less skillfully disguised by the trinitarian dogma19. The suspicion of idolatry that, from a Jewish and Muslim point of view, weighs upon Christianity stems notably from this feeling that the dogma of the Incarnation is a clever way of setting the Father aside, of relegating him to the side of a conception of justice and of the Law that Christianity took to heart to rid itself of: the Christian unconscious would reveal its will to “kill the Father.” Hence also what one might call the growing feminization of the Christian religious imaginary (and principally the Catholic one), the mother/son couple substituting itself for the patriarchal alliance of the Father and his creature. A part of secularized Christian culture has never ceased to express this primacy of the son over the father, by celebrating the exaltation of the spiritual or vital forces of youth against the party of order and conservation embodied by the fathers. One might find in Goethe the elements of a theology of the Son (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther)) and the rejection of the prescriptive morality founded on the prohibitions of the Old Testament (Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities)), which develops in these heterodox margins of Christianity. It would even be conceivable to extrapolate by considering the whole of the novelistic genre as the “genre of the Son,” prodigal, necessarily prodigal… That the Christian tradition was on the side of the fathers takes nothing away from the fact that the Christian narrative identity, affirmed in the evangelical narrative and the Pauline writings, but also in the concrete forms that “christocentrism” has been able to take (sacred history, iconography), constituted the breeding ground of that partial, oblique, or violent delegitimation of the paternal Law that constitutes one of the touchstones of Western modernity.
In Which the Impatient Reader Finds Don Juan Again
To understand this anti-legalist, anti-paternal dimension of the Christian unconscious is to give oneself better chances of answering the question that orients our study: why has Don Juan, who is presented in the plays as an enemy of God, aroused, so to speak from the very origin, a form of troubled fascination, mingled at times with a secret assent? It is that if the myth represents infidelity to Christian values, the expression of this infidelity is not foreign to the unconscious constituents of the Christian imaginary.
— The monstrous dimension of the Commander takes on a more precise meaning if it is referred to the Christian ambivalence with regard to the figure of “God the father.” The Commander is a guest of stone, that stone in which the God of justice of the Old Testament had his commandments engraved; he enunciates a law of justice that expresses itself, in Tirso de Molina, in an accountant’s form: “There is no debt that is not paid […] What you have done, you pay for.” The Commander is therefore the resurgence of the avenging God of the Old Testament, the one whom, for many Christians, one may fear but not love; the implicit allusion to the law of talion, if it is perfectly logical from the standpoint of a retributive divine justice, completes the placing of the Commander on the side of a patriarchal conception of the Law. In other words, the form that, in the myth of Don Juan, God’s emissary takes allowed the Christian ambivalence with regard to the Law to expose itself openly: if Don Juan is a criminal, a sinner, the justice that chastises him has an infernal face20. Even if the monk Tirso de Molina was a thousand leagues from such an intention, the legendary scenario he seized upon encountered, in spite of itself, the unconscious delegitimation of the paternal Law in the Christian “grand narrative.”
— If the figure of the Commander is monstrous, beginning with Molière, it is to women that the function of saving Don Juan will be devolved. For the paternal and masculine path of salvation, imaginarily discredited, is therefore substituted a feminine intercession. There lies the other symptom of the imaginary reversal effected by Christianity, and of the splitting between paternal justice and maternal mercy. In Molière’s Dom Juan, the most striking character is not so much the Commander as Elvire, a sinner returned to God, coming vainly to offer the one who betrayed her his ultimate chance of redemption. Despite her failure, Elvire confirms what the spectator has sensed since the beginning of the play: that there is something likeable in Don Juan, since a woman of quality, on the way to sainthood, goes so far as to risk her soul to save him. The invention of Elvire also expresses the juncture between carnal passion and Christian love: even in a “flame purified of all commerce of the senses,” the spectator still perceives the tremors of a woman in love. From the moment that sainthood is also said through the body and through desire, infidelity no longer appears solely as a crime to be chastised, but as the avatar of a passion that, for being misdirected, is no less a part of what one might call the drive economy of the divine. As early as Molière, the Romantic idea surfaces that there is, in Don Juan’s misconduct, the pathology of a generous soul. The world is no longer organized according to the antagonistic schema of prohibition and transgression, but according to a dynamic of desire that leads sometimes to the ecstasy of the saints, sometimes to the license of the debauched, without any true solution of continuity. It is the inner energy, the order of feeling, not the observance of a rule, that henceforth defines the human. When it is no longer the Law that combats crime, but Love that struggles against a misguided desire, the matter grows complicated.
— One can, in this perspective, go so far as to assert that Don Juan appears as a problematic double of Christ. He is not so much the one who, like the devil, would teach a law in every point contrary to the evangelical teaching as its ironic obverse or its critical reverse. As soon as the erotic-amorous dimension begins to take a determining place in the constitution of the myth, Don Juan projects a particular light on the biblical injunction of love of one’s neighbor. Does he not flatter himself on lavishing an equal love upon all (feminine) creatures, without distinction of social conditions (peasant women or noblewomen) or of nationalities (“I feel a heart to love the whole earth”), giving his own version of the unlimited love lavished by the Christian God? Is the famous catalogue of Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni not the most accomplished version of a “catholic,” that is, universal, love?
What, in a Molière, can still pass for a homonymic play between carnal desire and charity, Eros and agape, is pushed further in the Romantic era. Lenau thus constantly plays at subverting evangelical imagery. In a pagan rewriting of the Last Supper, Don Juan-Dionysus, assisted by twelve apostles of female sex, reveals in an orgiastic ceremony the true meaning of divine love; at the end of the work, it is still the proponents of Christian morality who are on the side of resentment, and it is Don Juan who, having exhausted his vital force, dies, in a sense, of having loved too much. We find here the paradox already noted: infidelity to Christianity is made, still, in the name of a value, universal love, inscribed within the Christian horizon.
Don Juan is a prophet of love who has, to put it summarily, another conception of incarnation than Christianity: to the Christian dogma of the Word made flesh, he responds with a divinization of desire. But in so doing, he refers back to all the fundamental equivocation of a religion that wills at once to incarnate the spirit and to spiritualize bodies. Hence the fundamental embarrassment of Christianity that Eugène Enriquez expounds in these terms:
“In inventing the sin of the flesh, Christianity operates an essential transformation in the structure of the imaginary. Among the Jews, the uncreated God was totally different from the beings he fashioned, beings of flesh, of silt and of clay. The sacred announces itself as totally transcendent.”By contrast, when, among the Christians, God becomes man, he risks being taken completely into this corporeity, of arousing a new paganism. So it is necessary, at the same time, that he have a body and that he have none. This contradiction is surmountable only if his conception is extraordinary […], if his mother is immaculate, if Joseph is only a witness and not a father. He cannot have been created by an act of the flesh: in this his divine origin is at stake. But by the same stroke the act of the flesh (sexuality) is the indelible mark upon man of his belonging to the human and not to the divine. To accede to the divine, to be able to rejoin Jesus, man can only detach himself from the flesh. […] (Christianity) thus recognizes the central place of the libido and immediately tries to deny it.”21
The flesh is guilty, but it is also that through which the redemptive project must necessarily pass. All of Christian art plays on this equivocation of the incarnation, eroticizing the saints, male and female, to the full, from Saint John the Baptist to Saint Sebastian, from Saint Teresa to Mary Magdalene: the invention of the sin of the flesh is inseparable, in the West, from the development of eroticism in art, even religious art.
In other words, Don Juan fascinates not only because he sins, or because he would slake the repressed desires of a humanity educated in the Christian repression of sexuality, but above all because his devotion to desire makes Christian consciences hear a different understanding, strange and familiar at once (unheimlich), captivating and frightening, of the Christian imperative of love. Because the Christian conscience understands at once that donjuanesque desire is not Christian love, and that it is not as foreign to it as a moralist perspective might lead one to think. From the moment that love, even Christian love, cannot express itself outside all carnal mediation, the limits between desire, love, and charity are anything but determined. What wonder that a whole Romantic generation set about demonstrating that Don Juan was, unbeknownst to himself, in quest of God or, what amounts to the same, of the unique woman? He will be forgiven because he has loved much.
Don Juan is therefore a Christian myth on two counts, first in its condemnation of sin, then in its repugnance toward the avenging Father: it reproduces in depth the Christian ambivalence with regard to the Law. Béatrice Didier wondered, not long ago, whether the Revolution had guillotined the Commander22; there is every reason to think that, far earlier, an unavowed part of the Christian imaginary had dispatched the Commander to hell, with all his commandments. The tendencies of Romantic donjuanism are therefore not so much, as one might have thought, a de-Christianization of the myth, but a reorientation of the interpretation, founded on the growing disqualification of the Commander, the growing place attributed to the feminine element, and the rehabilitation of the unfaithful one, bard of a sensible love that invisible threads connect to the ambivalence of the flesh in the Christian cultural imaginary.
There comes, however, a moment when the discredit that affects the Law turns back against desire itself. Lenau’s work, in which the Statue of the Commander remains desperately inert, already lets us foresee the decline of a desire that the force of prohibition no longer makes vibrate. If the twentieth century has been prodigal in new versions of the myth, one will hardly be surprised that they have been placed, for the most part, under the sign of derision and decadence. When the figure of the Commander has lost the little authority that remained to it; when woman has conquered her equality on the terrain of desire—and can give the fickle husband a taste of his own medicine… or ask for a divorce—; when, finally, seduction and adultery are no longer a metaphysical adventure, but find themselves in tune with a permissive morality, is it still simply possible to give credit again to this myth? Donjuanism no longer reeks of either the stake or the incense—at most of phenol. The Don Juans to come will disseminate themselves into the figures of anonymous Internet users who, roaming virtual chatrooms, will no longer even take the trouble to “go through with the act,” and will no longer come up against, when they go too far, anything but good-natured and innocuous Commanders, rebaptized “Webmasters”… Initially conceived as a call to order, a religious summons, the myth of Don Juan will nonetheless have illustrated, from one end of its history to the other, the tensions and the aporias of Christian morality, if not its impossibility.
Notes
The title of Tirso de Molina’s foundational play is El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest). “Abuseur” translates the Spanish “burlador”: the one who deceives, who plays tricks (burla).↩︎
See Sara Kofman and J.-Y. Masson, Don Juan ou le refus de la dette (Don Juan, or the Refusal of the Debt), Galilée.↩︎
Sara Kofman, op. cit., p. 70.↩︎
J. Guicharnaud, Molière, une aventure théâtrale (Molière, a Theatrical Adventure), Gallimard, p. 239.↩︎
Lenau, Don Juan, Aubier bilingual edition, p. 28.↩︎
And virtually ridiculous, moreover: it is one of the often underestimated aspects of machine theater: the slightest false maneuver, the slightest lapse of taste, and the effect of terror gives way to laughter. The Statue, in the theater, is a giant with feet of clay, resting on the most precarious of foundations.↩︎
Camille Dumoulié, Don Juan ou l’héroïsme du désir (Don Juan, or the Heroism of Desire), PUF, p. 34.↩︎
Julia Kristeva, Histoire d’amour (Tales of Love), Folio, 1983.↩︎
Let us add that the axiology proper to the theater, at least to comedy, leads the spectator to take, rather spontaneously, the side of the young against that of the old, the side of the sons against that of the fathers. The hybrid character of the works of Tirso and Molière, borrowing from comic and tragic registers, serves further to express the moral ambiguity of the myth.↩︎
The idea of the obsolescence of the Law also has evangelical sources: “no one puts new wine into old wineskins” (Luke 5:36).↩︎
Rémi Brague, La Loi de Dieu, Histoire philosophique d’une alliance (The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea), Gallimard, 2005, p. 313.↩︎
Hence the opposition, certainly often schematic but not without foundation, between Christian orthodoxy and Jewish orthopraxy. Rémi Brague thus notes that, beginning in the nineteenth century, “Jewish thinkers present a critique of Christianity, one of whose themes bears precisely on the value of the Law: Christianity sees itself accused of ‘anomism.’ One of the first to bring this critique, Joseph Salvador, in a book published in 1838, coined the neologism of ‘legicide’” (Brague, p. 301).↩︎
Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion (The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion), Gallimard, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines, 1983, p. II. Which Rémi Brague takes up, in a trenchant shorthand, in expounding that “our societies, with their program of a law without the divine, are in fact rendered possible in the last analysis by the Christian experience of a divine without law” (op. cit., p. 315).↩︎
Rémi Brague, p. 114.↩︎
Rémi Brague, pp. 113-114.↩︎
Ibid., p. 253.↩︎
On this point see the capital book by Rémi Brague, Europe, la voie romaine (Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization), Gallimard. For an attempt to distinguish between Christian “Europe” and “Marcionite” West, we also permit ourselves to refer to our conclusion in La Fiction de l’Occident (The Fiction of the West), PUF, 1999.↩︎
Erich Fromm, Le dogme du Christ et autres essais (The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays), 1975, Complexe ed., pp. 49-50.↩︎
Many elements of European cultural history—beginning with the still-open quarrels between the different Christian confessions concerning the respective shares of the Father and the Son in the Trinity—could be interpreted in the light of this unspoken, but foundational, rivalry.↩︎
The one who intends to fulfill contracts scrupulously, in Western culture, is Shylock (in The Merchant of Venice) or Mephisto (in Faust).↩︎
Eugène Enriquez, op. cit., pp. 290-291.↩︎
Béatrice Didier, “Des lumières au romantisme : a-t-on guillotiné le Commandeur ?” (“From the Enlightenment to Romanticism: Has the Commander Been Guillotined?”), Don Juan, Catalogue of the exhibition, Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991, pp. 153-9.↩︎