The sickness unto death.

Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, by Roger Scruton (Oxford, 248 pp., $25)

TOWARD the end of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, Tristan tears a bandage from his body and thus allows the life to flow out of himself. For Wagner, the act represents Tristan's free embrace of a sacrificial death, the decisive testimony of his love for Isolde and his desire for a union so absolute that it can be realized only in death. In Wagner's depiction of erotic love as a kind of sickness unto death, Roger Scruton finds not just a masterpiece of music, but also a remedy for what ails the modern world--a "morbidly unheroic world," dominated by "cost-benefit calculation," which tempts us to regard our own existence as nothing more than a "cosmic mistake."

The remedy for our temptation to banal self-interest and despair is, in the surprisingly Kantian language Scruton deploys, for us to "live as if a heroic love were possible, and as if we could renounce life for the sake of it." The central problem with Scruton's ambitious thesis has to do with the Kantian way in which he frames our redemption through art. The difficulty concerns whether we can achieve redemption by embracing what we know to be a fiction, a human construct. That is the burden of living "as if."

Yet Scruton has such a deft sense of the important questions, and wears his erudition so lightly and exhibits it with such clarity and concision, that, even where one disagrees sharply with the argument, one cannot but be grateful for all the avenues of thought his marvelous little book opens up. Indeed, Scruton combines interdisciplinary range with technical clarity in a manner rare among contemporary authors.

Scruton does not succumb to the mistake of making the music or poetry of Tristan a mere vehicle of philosophical speculation. The book contains entire chapters of brilliant analyses of music; even where he discusses character, dialogue, plot, or philosophy, Scruton is habitually and meticulously attentive to the opera's music. He focuses on the role of musical themes or motives, "fragments of music with a memory." For Beethoven, motives, once introduced, served to "generate the background pulse" of the musical drama and to keep divergent threads alive as subplots; similarly, for Wagner, the notes of the famous Prelude, with its distinctive Tristan Chord, do not so much prepare or introduce as they set in motion the action of the drama "by purely musical means."

Wagner was able to meld the musical, the literary, the philosophical, and the theological partly owing to the elevated stature of aesthetics and music in late-18th-and early-19th-century philosophy. Schopenhauer, for example, considered music the most powerful of the arts. Wagner relied on Schopenhauer, but faulted him for seeing the bonds between individuals as illusory, merely epiphenomena of the primordial reality of the Will, which is interested not in individuals but in the species. For Wagner, this eliminates the very essence of erotic love: the particular and personal object of desire.

In Tristan, circumstances do not favor this love. Tristan and Isolde are on opposite sides in battle; indeed, in their first meeting, which precedes the action of the drama, Isolde herself discovered that an injured man whose small boat carried him to the coastline of her home in Ireland is Tristan, the slayer of her betrothed. Planning to exact revenge, she stood with sword raised over the sick Tristan; then he opened his eyes and they became eternally bound. The mutual gazing of "The Look," to which Wagner ascribes a particular musical motif that recurs throughout the drama, prompts in Tristan and Isolde a soul-shattering discovery that drives the action.

This bears some superficial resemblance to the star-crossed-lovers plot of Romeo and Juliet, but Tristan is not a tragedy. Scruton draws a nice contrast between the heroes of classical tragedies, who are ensnared by outside forces, and Wagner's erotic heroes, whose snare is of their own making, an affirmation of desires arising from their inmost being. In their free and self-conscious embracing of erotic desire, the lovers seek and achieve a transcendent union with no correlate in the empirical world. Once again, Scruton uses Kantian language--in this case, the dichotomy between the deterministic world of experience and the realm of freedom.

In contrast to the sacramental marital bond, which bends erotic desire to the task of reproduction and underpins rather than subverts the social order, Wagner focuses on the sacred moment of erotic consummation. He does this, writes Scruton, "to show us that it is indeed sacred, and to reawaken in us a knowledge that the erotic is ... an aspect of our freedom and an avenue of redemption." This account of erotic desire puts Wagner and Scruton at odds with Freud, whose depiction of sexuality Scruton views as "transformed by a kind of scientistic prurience, and by an obsession with the human object that clouds awareness of the subject."

Against the abstract, bloodless, and calculating reason of modernity, Wagner sought to revive through art a distinctively pre-modern and originally religious conception of the world--in which, Scruton notes, "rituals, oaths, acts of heroic sacrifice" are not adventitious intrusions but are woven into the very fabric of communal life. Despite Scruton's eloquent plea, however, the rehabilitation of modern humanity through art is deeply problematic. There is the obvious problem with Wagner's peculiar way of framing our path to redemption, the problem of how we are to understand the intimate connection between erotic desire and death, an insistence that can, as Scruton himself is aware, become easily twisted into a macabre celebration of the self-destructive pursuit of whatever is forbidden.

Moreover, Wagner and Scruton's return to a pre-modern experience of the sacred is decidedly incomplete, since the pre-modern experience would have been wedded to a belief in the actual existence of heroic love and fidelity, not predicated upon a belief in the value of living "as if" such devotion were possible. Scruton's Kantian defense of the salutary nature of myth reposes upon a conception of the sacred as entirely man-made. This raises the serious question, voiced in other contexts by the late British philosopher Bernard Williams, whether a conception like this is not "unstable under reflection." That is, can we give our sacred honor, indeed our very selves, to a conception of redemption that we know to be a human construct?

Whatever might be the weaknesses of the argument, Scruton's Death-Devoted Heart--in conjunction with the musical, literary, philosophical, and theological works he cites--is a timely reminder of what liberal education is about. Scruton takes the great works, including great works of music, as making decisive contributions to the way we think and feel about what is important in human life. Scruton exhibits something noble in the Wagnerian project, something that touches longings woven deeply into the human soul.

Mr. Hibbs is dean of the Honors College at Baylor University.