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At the end of the 17th century, the theological controversy over pure love captivated the whole of Europe. The two writers and bishops François Fénelon and Jacques B. Bossuet were at the center of it.
Historically, Fénelon emerged from the dispute as the loser, but morally as the victor.
Can man transcend himself? Is he capable of pure love? Or must and can love exist only as enlightened, sublimated self-love? Fénelon holds that there is unselfish, unconditional (God's) love, amour pur. Fénelon's position is rejected as a "chimera" by the Church, by the Pope, and by Louis XIV after massive influence by Bossuet. With this decision, however, the actual problem is only postponed, not clarified. To reject the pure love of God is to establish a bourgeois anthropology and to reverse classical teleology into functionalism:
No longer self-transcendence, as in classical philosophy, but self-preservation and self-assertion become the paradigm of modern times and bourgeois modernity.