As stated at
the opening of the program last week, the Gypsy Scholar is one of those people
who, if they’re going to recognize any of our holidays at all, want to go past
the habitual superficiality and commercialization and look for a deeper meaning
and significance. But with the highly commercialized and, as far as our main
holidays go, light-weight Valentine’s Day, it’s a little bit more difficult to
find a deeper meaning other than the saccharine hearts-and-flowers ambiance
with which we’re so familiar; a day that seems merely a commercial excuse to
perpetuate the most sentimentalized aspects of the reality of romantic
love—or should I say, in anticipation of its critics, the “illusion” of
romantic love. As I said in my opening essay on Romantic Love last week: Surely,
on a popular level, we all take “romantic love” for granted in our modern
courtship rituals, our hearts-and-flowers Valentine’s Day observances, and even
in our penchant for the “romantic comedies” that draw us to the cinema for
romance by proxy. And, certainly,
again, there are those who are so tired of all of this that they would like to
forget about it entirely. Thus for
many couples Valentine’s Day amounts to a dinner, a movie, and a good lay. Not that there’s necessarily anything
necessarily wrong with that; it’s just that (as some hard-nosed critics would
have it), it’s ultimately unsatisfying for our deeper yearnings for love. Be that as it may, the Gypsy Scholar, being
the incurable romantic that he is, attempted, in his first essay on the
Troubadours & the Beloved, to see if there was anything of real substance
to be found in Valentine’s Day.
Before I get
into my polemic directed at the nay-sayers of “romantic love”—those who I
said would like nothing better than to ignore Valentine’s Day—it would be
useful to get some historical perspective on the background on the holiday.
The origins of
Valentine’s Day, like the origins of love itself, are obscure and
complicated—a combination of myth, history, chance, and marketing. Of course, one could go in the
Christian direction and think of St. Valentine the martyr. Legend has it that a
certain third-century priest named Valentine persisted in performing marriage
ceremonies despite a ban by the Roman emperor Claudius II (Claudius was
persuaded that single men made better soldiers for his army). Thrown into jail,
St. Valentine was executed on February 14, circa the year 270. It seems that Valentine
had formed a relationship with his jailor’s daughter and he signed his last
message to her “From your Valentine,” or so the legend goes. St. Valentine’s Day was on the official
Church list of feast days from 496, when Pope Gelasius I established it, until
1969, when Pope Paul VI dropped it from the calendar. This hagiographic legend is thus one way to give more
religious weight to Valentine’s Day.
Be this as it may, for historical fact instead of legend the first
valentine on record was sent in 1415 by Charles, duke of Orleans, to his wife
while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London.
While it is
true that St. Valentine gives Valentine’s Day a more respectable ambiance, just
as there’s a deeper background to St. Nicholas, who is associated with our
Christmas tradition and Santa Claus (as I have previously presented in my
Christmas essay), so too is there is an earlier, suppressed background to the
patron saint of Valentine’s Day.
In point of fact, the heretical Valentinian Gnostics believed sex could have a sacramental
dimension. Their
founder, Valentinus (c. 160 AD) emphasized the idea of spiritual marriage as a
divine union—a union with God—not as a social contract, which was,
after all, the Roman Church’s view. The Valentinian Gnostics took a particular
interest in the special relations that they believed existed between Jesus and
Mary Magdalene, who also symbolized for them the union of the heavenly Christ
with the heavenly Sophia (Wisdom). Added to this, they held the view, like
Plato did, that the original state of humankind was one of androgyny, and that
the fall into matter was at one and the same time the division of the
sexes. Thus, a “spiritualizing” of
sex was considered to represent a restoration of the original union of male and
female and, thereby, a return to God.
But by the fourth century, this idea had been suppressed by the Church
of Rome. So the Gypsy Scholar
would ask: Did we end up with the wrong St. Valentine for the name of the
holy-day/holiday for lovers? In other words, just like the dating of
Christmas, one can discover, underneath all the glamorization and
commercialization of our Valentine’s Day celebration, another Christian
late-coming co-optation of an earlier religious myth; a survival of an
age-old pagan fertility mythico-ritual, under the god Eros. (This seems to hark back to a religious mythic complex that
predates classical Greek and Roman times, which had to do with the love and
“sacred marriage,” the heiros gamos,
between a god and goddess, such as the Sumero-Bablyloian myth of Inanna and
Dumuzi. It even seems to go
further back—way, way back—to the Neolithic Goddess culture. As I
will argue in an upcoming essay, this has intriguing implications for the
Troubadour culture of the South of France). Be that as it may, the most direct link to our Valentine’s
celebration happens to be the pre-Christian or pagan custom that took place in
preparation for the Roman festival of Lupercalia, which started February
15. The names of the town’s
maidens would be collected and then drawn at random by the local bachelors; in
this fashion couples were paired off for the year.
The Gypsy
Scholar would argue that Valentine’s Day, while it has a Christian cast to it,
has, at its most momentous, its roots in a pre-Christian spiritual tradition,
and was revived in part in the Latin “High Middle Ages.” Thus, he doesn’t know
what you think of when Valentine’s Day comes along, but the Gypsy Scholar
thinks of the Troubadours of the “twelfth-century Renaissance.”
There are
certain substantial clues you can find for this association with Valentine’s
Day, one more substantial but less direct than St. Valentine the martyr. When
you google “Valentine’s Day,” besides St. Valentine, you will find the name of
the most famous English author of the Middle Ages, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer
(c. 1343 - 1400). Why? Because
“medieval Europeans thought February 14 was the date on which the birds started
to mate. They got this idea from a
dream-vision poem, “Parlement of Foules,” by Chaucer: “for this was on seynt
Volantynys day / Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his mate.” What is
significant is that Chaucer was heavily influenced by Troubadour poetry. In fact, he wrote stories about courtly
love in his epic, “Canterbury Tales.”
Furthermore, the association I’m positing is substantiated because it is
said of his “Parlement of Foules,” (or “Parliament of the Birds”) that it was
the first reference to the idea that St. Valentine’s Day was a special day for
Romantic love and lovers. This is
doubly significant, since I have written about the Arabic/Persian origins of
courtly love. It seems that
Chaucer’s “Parlement of Foules,” was based on the poem by the Sufi mystic,
Attar, “Conference of the Birds,” 1177.
A more specific historical connection is the fact that the year Chaucer
died, 1400, was the first Valentine’s Day, when the French royal court held a
“Court of Love” (Cour Amoreuse),
in which ministers met after mass in “joyous recreation and talk about love.”
Love poems were presented before the ladies, who judged them and awarded a
golden crown for the best one.
Therefore, the
Gypsy Scholar feels that all this means Valentine’s Day is actually a deeper
and more spiritual holiday than the one we have come to know through contrived
ad campaigns and the pop love songs identified with “romantic love.”
And speaking
of “romantic love,” the Gypsy Scholar will next deal with the $64, 000 question
that always comes up on Valentine’s Day.
1. Valentine Heart
I
know it as surely as my death, since I have learned from the agony itself: the
noble lover loves love stories. Anyone yearning for such a story, then, need
fare no farther than here: for I shall story him well of noble lovers who of
pure love gave proof enough: he in love; she in love….
Gottfried von
Strassburg, the early 13th-century author of Tristan and Isold, is talking about that special kind of
love that the world had never seen before the 12th century—amor.
Other poets and writers, beginning in the 12th century,
retold the story of the two ill-fated lovers, those like Chretien, Béroul,
Thomas, Marie de France, and, finally, Wagner. I say retold because it was an
ancient legend before it was written down, probably, scholars speculate, of
Welsh or Irish origin. I begin with this story of love and death because it has
been seen as the prototype of “love in the Western world.” As we shall soon
see, its ideal of “romantic love” has survived in the literature of modern
times. Given, the split between sacred and profane love instituted by the early
Christian theologians that dominated medieval thought and its application to
holy wedlock, and given the attacks on romantic love in the context of modern
relationships by psychologists and behavioral scientists, the question is: Is
romantic love anything but an inferior form of love, if not an illusion, that
mature couples should grow out of? Is it no deeper than how it is portrayed in
the next formulaic, run-of-the-mill romantic comedy?
It looks like
the Gypsy Scholar is going to take up, given sorry state of relationships
today, yet another historical lost cause. I’m talking about that
much-beleaguered species of love, “romantic love.” It doesn’t seem that anyone of any expertise these days has
anything good to say about it and, thus, if this endangered species of love
goes extinct, then good riddens! Valentine’s Day progressively brings out the
nay-sayers who seem to enjoy a cynical pleasure in demonstrating how silly
romantic lovers are and how, by comparison, their relationships are soberly
grounded in reality. (Not that there isn’t enough to criticize about the
commercialized lover’s holiday.) They seem emboldened in this cynicism. After
all, hasn’t science now proven that “romantic love” is nothing but a bio-chemical
reaction? And who would be foolish
enough to doubt the latest findings of science, except the most wooly-minded,
incurable romantic? Thus, at the
risk of proving what many have suspected all along, the Gypsy Scholar is going
to argue that it’s not a chemical that is responsible for “romantic love,” but
what they used to call a divine agent, a god; that god being Eros (the
unsentimentalized Cupid of our Valentine’s Day). No, not the release of
neurotrophins from the brain but the influx of amor in the heart through the eyes. Romantic love was not an illusion, but
a “divine visitation.”
So,
through the eyes love attains the heart:
For
the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And
the eyes go reconnoitering
For
what it would please the heart to possess.
And
when they are in full accord
And
firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At
that time, perfect love is born
From
what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not
otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Than
by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.
By
the grace and by command
Of
these three, and from their pleasure,
Love
is born, who with fair hope
Goes
comforting her friends.
For
as all true lovers
Know,
love is perfect kindness,
Which
is born—there is no doubt—from the heart and eyes.
The
eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.
(Guiraut de
Borneilh c. 1138-1200?)
In the poetry of the Troubadours, then, “love is born of the eyes
and heart, in the world of day, in a moment of aesthetic arrest, but opens
within to a mystery of night.”
2. Crazy Love
Let the Gypsy
Scholar start off this defense of “romantic love” by clearing up a fundamental
confusion. That is to say, the ideal of “love”—amor—of the Troubadour poets and the Romantic
poets is not the bourgeois notion of “romantic love.” This modern
version—that within marriage—is what I would call the domestification of “romantic love.” By definition, the
original ideal of the Troubadours was a “love”–amor—outside marriage, or wedlock,
which was socially sanctioned by the Church and, therefore, “illicit,” since it
was not for the expressed purpose of procreation.
However,
the troubadours, minnesingers, and epic poets of the century, in their
celebration of amor,
remained in Nietzsche's sense "true to this earth," this vale of
tears where the devil roams for the ruin of souls. For in their view, not
heaven but this blossoming earth was to be recognized as the true domain of
love, as it is of life, and the corruption ruinous of love was not of nature
(of which love is the very heart) but of society, both lay and ecclesiastical:
the public order and, most immediately, its sacramentalized loveless marriages.
In Courtly
Love, or cortezia,
the emphasis was on the difference between the cult of “true love” (which was
both earthly and heavenly), or fin’amors, as contrasted with the fals’amors of the majority (which was merely
earthly); characterized by inconstancy, insincerity, and petty jealousy, and
which excluded them from the loving elite. This fin’amors was also to some a “distant love,” which
could only be attained by a renunciation of the deceitful love that
characterized normal relations between men and women.
The modern
critics of “romantic love”—the Marxists, psychotherapists,
neuroscientists, the priests or ministers, and the rest—each in their own
way tell us that what we know and cherish as “romantic love” is an illusion.
For instance, the psychologists and the behavioral scientists tell us that
“romantic love” is extremely short-lived, and that married couples who endure
move past this initial illusion to a more mature kind of love and settle into
something more real, which some call “companionship.” While, admittedly, there
are some good correctives to today’s notion of a sentimentalized and
commercialized “romantic love,” it nonetheless could be asked: If the brunt of
the attack on “romantic love” is that it’s an illusion, how many other things
about or contemporary lives are then susceptible to the same charge? For instance,
to name perhaps the greatest, the churchmen have told the people, from the days
of the Troubadours on, that the only real form of love is that of God, agape or caritas.
Yet, to an increasing number of thinking people (beginning with Marx and
Freud), this loving father-God is the biggest illusion of all! Shall we then outgrow the childish
illusion of monotheistic religion along with the childish notion of romantic
love? (I should note here that my analogy of illusions is not as imprecise as
it might at first appear. In fact, there is a significant connection. The
heretical Cathari of southern France, associated with the Troubadours and
finally hunted down in the Church’s Albigensian crusade, believed, as all true
Gnostics did, that Jehovah, was in reality a tyrannical usurper—“the
demiurge”—; a false God. So
it looks like some of our detractors of romantic love are burdened by a greater
illusion than the troubdaour/cathari—or the rest of us incurable
romantics.)
Of course, the
criticism of illusion, when coming from the medical camp, amounts to a verdict
of pathology or disease. Actually,
this criticism was there at the very beginning of the phenomenon of “romantic
love;” it was seen as a kind of insanity.
But what seriously complicates the issue is that the Troubadours
themselves agreed and yet had a positive take on the insanity charge; for it
was an insanity visited upon the lover, through the eyes and heart, by the god
Eros and, thus, a divine insanity, at once a curse and a blessing. This means that mad lovers (whether
then or today) are not susceptible to reason. They are not going to be talked out of their madness by the
level-headed experts. Let me not ignore
the “scientists” in this put- down of “romantic love.” We recently hear that what we
experience as “romantic love” is nothing but chemical reactions in the brain.
Of course, these are the same rat-maze reductionists who tell us that
“consciousness” itself is nothing but the epiphenomenon of brain chemistry.
(Here, I’m talking about the reigning materialistic/mechanistic scientific
model, or “illusion.”)
As to the
temporality issue in the put-down of “romantic love.” Again, the charge is that this form of love is too short
lived and, by implication, relationships, especially marriage, just don’t last.
News flash! “Romantic love lasts little more than a year, Italian scientists
believe.” Leaving aside other very good reasons for
the high failure rate of couples, like economic, for the moment, one could ask:
Isn’t time relative in relationships?
The Romantic poets, the heirs of the Troubadours (indeed, they are
credited for single-handedly rediscovering them and bringing them back from
disrepute), were particularly outspoken on this issue. They would rather have a
short-lived, intense, and profound love affair than a mediocre and lifeless
marriage that dragged on interminably.
In fact, they applied this sensibility to life itself; speaking
metaphorically, they preferred the blazing but momentary life of the comet to
the long but dull life of the stone.
Compare D. H. Lawrence, an heir to the Romantics: “Love is the flower of
life, and blossoms unexpectedly and without law, and must be plucked where it
is found, and enjoyed for the brief hour of its duration.”
And last, but
not least, there’s the criticism of “romantic love” as simply too fraught with
agony to be worth it. But again,
thinking of the Troubadours, this is a matter of perspective. A so-called “bad”
love-relationship can teach the lover more about life than a so-called “good”
one. Thus, this in itself is no valid negation of “romantic love.” (Indeed, I have, in a previous essay,
documented the positive value the Troubadours put on unrequited love and the
dark side of love—“love’s wound.”
And, besides, where would we get the perverse bluesy pleasure that only
the sad love song can give!) The
sanitized, domestic “romantic love” that is the straw-man of the hard-headed
critics is a love that is divorced from love’s wound, a “romantic love” that
would be unrecognizable to the Troubadours.
As the
glow of love’s inward fire increases, so the frenzy of the lover’s suit. But
this pain is so full of love, this anguish so enheartening, that no noble heart
would dispense with it, once having been so heartened. (Gottfried von
Strassburg, Tristan and Isold)
3. Light My Fire
At the risk of
oversimplification, this is the old battle of the hard-headed realists against
dreamers. To be clear, my essays
on “romantic love” are historical in nature, celebrating the love—amor—of the Troubadours in poetry and
song. And they generally apply to
today only in that the convention of “romantic love” is carried on, beginning
in the sixties, in popular love-song (but not just any inane love song that
hits the pop charts). However, by implication, my past essays do affirm
“romantic love” today, albeit with reservations. I do believe that “romantic
love” still maintains an energy and deeper dimension that can be used as a path
to a greater life—even a spiritual path to higher consciousness, if not transcendence. If this qualifies me as one of those
“incurable romantics,” then so be it. Thus, in a wider sense, my essays do
serve to champion “romantic love,” but a deeper vision of it that has been
generally ignored in the our conventional notion. As I put it in my last essay: For the Troubadours of Courtly
Love and the later poets of the medieval Romance tradition this “love” ranged
from expressions of pure sexual desire to a selfless ideal worth even the
sacrificing of one’s life.
. . .
nature in its noblest moment—the realization of love—is an end and
glory in itself; and the senses, ennobled and refined by courtesy and art,
temperance, loyalty and courage, are the guides to this realization. Like a
flower potential in its seed, the blossom of the realization of love is
potential in every heart (or, at least, every noble heart) and requires only
proper cultivation to be fostered to maturity.
This love was
properly of a third kind, an alternative to both the Church’s agape and the pagan’s purely erotic. The
Troubadours called it amor. Mythologist Joseph Campbell is amazed
that theologians still don’t get this (and, I would add, neither to today’s
secular critics):
It is
amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agape and eros and their radical opposition, as though
these two were the final terms of the principle of "love": the
former, "charity," godly and spiritual, being "of men toward
each other in a community," and the latter, "lust," natural and
fleshly, being "the urge, desire and delight of sex.” Nobody in a pulpit
seems ever to have heard of amor
as a third, selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other two.
For amor is neither
of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and the community of
man), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual
incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one,
of the eyes and their message to the heart.
The
whole meaning of their [the troubadours] stanzas lay in the celebration of a
love the aim of which was neither marriage nor the dissolution of the world.
Nor was it even carnal intercourse; nor, again—as among the
Sufis—the enjoyment, by analogy, of the "wine" of a divine love
and the quenching of the soul in God. The aim, rather, was life directly in the
experience of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force, of itself
opening the pierced heart to the sad, sweet, bittersweet, poignant melody of
being, through love's own anguish and love's joy.
Admittedly,
this was the ideal,
and I don’t want to be misunderstood as “idealizing” the Troubadours, for they
were sometimes guilty of not living up to the ideal or, as we would say today,
just trying to score. (Those who,
from a religious perspective, condemn romantic love in favor of the love of
God, using the worse examples of lovers, are the very same who would defend
God’s love in spite of the fact that his priests fall short of the ideal. Pray
tell, shall we not apply the same standard to the priests of amor?) However, to the psychological experts,
whether they are psychotherapists or marriage counselors, or the authors of the
generic self-help books, the cherished illusion of “romantic love” needs to be
outgrown in favor of a sober assessment of the relationship, usually the
matrimonial one. It is instructive
to know that these authorities on the correct way to love are actually the successors to
those 12th-century churchmen who had little patience or tolerance
for the “sublime”- or “refined love”— fin’amors —of the Troubadours, a love that
ennobled and made gentle the heart of the lover, usually a knight, even raising
to mystic heights. To quote Joseph Campbell again:
It is
again a mystic theme of individual experience in depth, opposed to the
sacramental claim, this time, of marriage. For in the Middle Ages marriage,
sanctified by the Church, was a socio-political arrangement, bearing no
relationship to the mystery and wonder of love. In the words of Professor Johan
Huizinga in his eloquent little book, The Waning of the Middle Ages, “From the side of religion maledictions
were poured upon love in all its aspects.” From the side of the court, on the
other hand, and of the poetry of experience . . . love “became the field where
all moral and cultural perfection flowered.” Love was a divine visitation,
quelling mere animal lust, whereas feudal marriage was a physical affair. The
lover, whose heart was rendered gentle by the discipline of his lady, was
initiate to a sphere of exalted realizations that no one who had experienced
such could possibly identify (as the Church identified them) with sin. One has
but to read the poems of Dante's Vita Nuova to realize to what spheres of mystic
trans port the courtly way of love might lead.
As opposed to
the general assumption that this is a consensus among the psychotherapeutic
community at large, there are dissenting opinions. There are, in fact, those who, while admitting that the
initial attraction is a mutual case of projection—the putting of one’s
fantasy of the ideal mate on an ordinary human being—nonetheless see a
positive value in this psychological projection mechanism of romantic
lovers. In fact, becoming aware of
the projection, far from negating the feeling of love or, in the worst case
scenario, terminating the relationship, serves, through working with the
projections, as a method or path to a deeper love—not a love that is
something other than “romantic” (the love of eros), but a deeper level of it. In other words, the couple can achieve
a psychological wholeness by integrating the other—the alienated and projected
feminine and masculine aspects respectively—into their psyches. This
could be termed the “psycho-spiritual path of romantic love.” Now this necessarily begs the question I
put forth to challenge what I perceive as the main illusion in the area of “love in the Western
world” in my essay “The Troubadours & the Beloved: The Secret Cult of the
Eros-Rose.” Is the
(theological) separation of “profane,” or earthly love from “sacred” or
heavenly love valid? Consequently, I have shown that for the
Troubadours and later the Romantic poets, the answer is a resounding No.
Without going into my argument for the reunion of profane with sacred love, as presented in my essays, I will simply
repeat the observation from Joseph Campbell:
It is
amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agape and eros and their radical opposition, as though
these two were the final terms of the principle of “love.”
The Gypsy
Scholar began this section by making a distinction between the “romantic love”
that was initiated by the Troubadours—amor—and the “romantic love” that is
the brunt of the criticism from today’s nay-sayers, which should be properly
recognized as the domestification (and sentimentalization) of amor.
In other words, that’s not amor; that ain’t amore! To justify the
assertion, Gypsy Scholar will give two prime examples of the anti-bourgeois
character of “romantic love.”
To start at
the very beginning of the notion—the famous story of Tristan and
Isolde. And then to the Romantics between the
late 18th and early 20th centuries, who had rediscovered
the Troubadours and evolved the notion.
In Tristan and Isolde,
the lovers are told that the love potion will be the death of them both and
that eternal death in hell awaits them. Tristan’s reply was absolutely
blasphemous for its times; never had anyone dared to speak like this:
So then,
God's will be done, whether death it be or life! For that drink has sweetly
poisoned me. What the death of which you tell is to be, I do not know; but this
death suits me well. And if delightful Isolt is to go on being my death this
way, then I shall gladly court an eternal death.
The second
example of the anti-bourgeois nature of “romantic love” comes from the
Romantic-Symbolist dramatic prose-poem Axel (1885) by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. The
scene takes place in the Byronic hero’s occult castle, where he has just met
his true love. They dream of the
glorious future, but Axel suddenly declares their dreams are far too
magnificent to be fulfilled in everyday, unimaginative reality, the reality too
many of us are content to live in.
The following passage is taken from a study of the play and serves to
challenge contemporary judgments of the illusory and transitory nature of
“romantic love.”
Sara turns
out to be a Rosicrucian, too: her escape from the convent has been signalized
by the blooming of the mystic rose. She and Axel embrace in an ecstasy: for the
first time, these two chaste and haughty spirits have found objects worthy of
their passion. . . . They are holding the whole world in their hands—they
have love, youth, social position, power, the supernatural backing of the
Rosicrucian spirits and . . . treasure—“all the dreams to realize,” says
Sara.
But here
Axel, “grave and impenetrable,” strikes an unexpected note. “Why realize them?”
he asks. “They are so beautiful!” And to her plea of “come and live!” he
replies: “Live? No. Our existence is full—and its cup is running over!
What hour-glass can count the hours of this night! The future? . . . Sara,
believe me when I say it: we have just exhausted the future. All the realities,
what will they be to-morrow in comparison with the mirages we have just lived?
. . . The quality of our hope no longer allows us the earth! What can we ask
from this miserable star where our melancholy lingers on save the pale
reflections of such moments? The Earth, dost thou say? What has the Earth ever
realized, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is only a lie in the heavens? It
is the Earth, dost thou not see? which has now become the illusion! Admit,
Sara: we have destroyed, in our strange hearts, the love of life—and it
is in REALITY indeed that ourselves have become our souls. To consent, after
this, to live would be but sacrilege against ourselves. Living? Our servants
will do that for us! . . . Oh, the external world! Let us not be made dupes by
the old slave, chained to our feet in broad daylight, who promises us the keys
to a palace of enchantments when it clutches only a handful of ashes in its
clenched black fist! . . .
He proposes
that they shall kill themselves at once. Sara demurs: she suggests one more
night of love. But Axel begs her not to be trivial. “Oh, my beloved,” he tries
to explain to her, “to-morrow I should be the prisoner of thy wondrous body!
Its delights would have enchained the chaste energy which animates me
now!”—and then, their love could never endure: some cursed day they would
find it burnt out. She pleads still: “But remember the human race!” “The
example I leave it,” he answers, “is well worth those it has given me.” “Those
who fight for Justice say that to kill oneself is to desert.” “The verdict of
beggars,” he declares, “for whom God is but a way to earn their bread.” “It
might be nobler to think of the general good!” “The universe devours itself: at
that price is the good of all” And he finally succeeds in persuading her: they
drink a goblet of poison together and perish in a rapture.
4. Dance Me to the End of
Love
Romantic
lovers living an illusion?
“Living? Our servants will do that for us!”—you won’t find a
greater indictment of bourgeois values and its notion of love than from this
courageous Romantic hero. (It
should be pointed out here that one of the many virtues of the courtly “code of
love” was courage.) Axel’s ideal of love may be criticized as too radical and
dark, but you can’t at the same time claim that this kind of “romantic love” is
too sentimental. Axel reminds of
the extreme ideal of love between Tristan and Isolde. Axel has thrown down the
gauntlet—just who
is living an illusion, the true romantic lovers or romantic love’s detractors?
Therefore, judging from the opinions of those who put down the contemporary,
domesticated form “romantic love,” it doesn’t seem they are very informed of
the original’s beginnings, its history, or even its portrayals in
literature. For that matter, many
of us are either ill-informed of this also, or, if we are, fail to appreciate
how revolutionary “romantic love” actually was in the Middle Ages, when the
Church controlled both love’s passion and women, marriage being a strictly
social arrangement. In other words, the troubadour “code of love,” championed
by the women of the court, was undermining the code of masculine domination.
The Code of
Love of Eleanor of Aquitaine was an attempt of women to create their own world
and dethrone masculine oppression and mastery, a practical way of rebelling
against the prevailing social mores and consciously adapted to serve this end.
Eleanor’s daughter, Marie de Champagne, ruled that love had no power as between
the parties to a marriage, and justified her ruling on the grounds that in love
everything depended on both parties giving themselves freely, whereas marriage
implied obligation and coercion, which was the death of love.
The poles
of the older social order were Pope and Emperor, priest and people, the soul
and God. The poles of courtly society were the lady and her “man,” her lover,
who owed fealty to her alone. . . . Once upon a time it was manifestations of
the Godhead that had made the heart . . . leap up in fear and trembling. Now
the heart had become the last resort against the princes and powers of this
world.
This “cult of
love” purified and refined the rugged warrior-knight into a poetic gentleman. These
noble ladies knew well enough that men regarded them as loot or
merchandise. In feudal society
marriage was an important political and commercial transaction, as it was to be
in the bourgeois society that succeeded it. For a long time feudal society took no account of love as an
emotion felt by individuals for each other, but these courtly ladies prescient
of a new age in which every man of breeding understood the arts of love and in
which Woman would come into her own, educating men in the ripeness of her
wisdom.
Once women
are free to bestow their favors and affections where they will, the whole
structure of patriarchal society starts to crumble. In the spiraling progress of the history of ideas this seems
to be the point that we have once again reached. Now it is an idea whose time has come and no crusades have
so far been launched by Church and State to quell it. If the Black Virgins really do carry a charge from the
[pagan] goddesses, perhaps, now that they have been ‘found’ again, they are
whispering in our ears like the female serpent of Eden ….
Also during
the Middle Ages in the same south of France where woman’s sexual power was once
venerated in the Paleolithic cave sanctuaries, there flourished the poets known
as troubadours and trobaritzes, whose songs of courtly love honored woman as
man’s spiritual inspiration and celebrated erotic love between woman and man….
It is a powerful legacy, this legacy of romance and ritual that the medieval
troubadours and trobaritzes left us despite the condemnation of the pleasures
of sex by the Church. And it is a
legacy that, as we have seen, stems from more ancient roots: from a time when
sexuality was associated with the sacred rather than the profane and the
obscene.
The
earliest French lyric, troubadour poetry, ushered in a challenge to the
prevailing social order. Some scholars of the period tell us: “The new thing
with the troubadours is simply the celebration of heterosexual emotion. . . .
real passion.” They also laud the “revolutionary implications of troubadour poetry,”
which, by its very existence “announced that love has been missing from out
civilization: here it is, what are you going to do about it.” Whether the put down of “romantic love”
comes from the theologians (sin) or the doctors (disease), the Minnesinger
(German troubadour), Walther objects:
Whoever
says that love is sin,
Let
him consider first and well:
Right
many virtues lodge therein
With
which we all, by rights, should dwell.
For
mythologist Joseph Campbell, the implications of the Troubadour ethos are even
more revolutionary; for the arrival of the Troubadours signals for Western
Europe the dawning of a new mythology and age, one in which the cultural and
spiritual hegemony of the Church’s ecclesiastical order is overthrown and, for
the first time, in the name of amor, the individual, his or her unique experience in this world,
and the human heart are the primary focus of spirituality.
In the
broadest view of the history of world mythology, the chief creative development
in the period of the waning Middle Ages and approaching Reformation was the
rise of the principle of individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority.
This marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the priestly mind, first,
over European thought and then, as today we see, in all the world. And
therewith a new world age dawned . . .
. . . it
was immediately thereafter that new mythology—quite new—neither of
animal nor of plant divinities, nor of the cosmic order and its God, but of
man, gradually came (and is still coming) to the fore, which is, in fact, the
only creative breath now operating for the future mankind centered in its own
terrestrial truth, blessedness, and will.
Let me note
before passing on, however, that even in the twelfth- and early
thirteenth-century flowering of Arthurian Romance the beginnings may be
recognized of this new mythology of man who in his native virtue is competent
both to experience and to render blessedness, even in the mixed field of this
our life on earth. Take the mystery of the Grail: For what reason, pray, should
a Christian knight ride forth questing for the Grail when at hand, in every
chapel, were the blessed body and blood of Christ literally present in the
sacrament of the altar for the redemption and beatitude of his soul?
The
answer, obviously, is that the Grail Quest was an individual adventure in
experience.
The
point that Campbell is trying to make here is that the “flowering of Arthurian
Romance,” from the poems/songs of the Troubadours created, in the medieval social
milieu that was heretofore theocratic, the first stirrings of what we know
today as the autonomous individual, whose authority was his or her own
conscience based on experience.
This is truly a revolutionary step in the evolution of consciousness, one that is not generally associated
with the Troubadours of the twelfth century, but with the sixteenth-century
Reformation. Thus Campbell sees it
as the dawning of a new age. One thinks of a renaissance. Here, it should be noted that one
historian has called the period of the Troubadours the “twelfth-century
Renaissance.”
I have tried
to remedy this ignorance of the origin and hidden nature of “romantic love” in
my previous essays. The critics of romantic love—from the churchmen to
the scientists—can throw all the polemical buckets of ice-water on hand
at the parade of mad lovers who insist in indulging in their romantic illusion,
but it didn’t do any good in the medieval period and it has done no good in the
modern. (It seems that Campbell’s
jab applies to the critics I’m talking about, because he states that if they
themselves remembered the transformative power of love when they were young,
they wouldn’t be so quick to make their “nothing but” pronouncements.) Even one as devout as St Bernard of
Clairvaux, preaching monasticism and Mariology in the time of the Troubadours,
couldn’t help himself making a connection with amor in his interpretation in the
embarrassingly erotic Song of Songs, the text of the Bible that encouraged many
Troubadours in their erotic poetry.
He knew these mad lovers weren’t susceptible to reason:
I am not
unmindful of the fact that the king's honor loveth judgment. But intense love does not wait upon
judgment. It is not restrained by counsel; it is not checked by a sense of false
modesty; it is not subject to reason. I ask, I implore, I entreat with all my
heart: Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.
As
the song goes: “Ah the dreamers ride against the men of action / Oh, see the
men of action falling back.” Again, for those dreamers of amor, the Troubadours, the rapture of love in this transitory life on earth, where all things
die, was the ideal; not the Church’s ideal of love to be had in life after
death.
Finally, there
is the issue of the criticism that love is a form of madness, in modern terms,
a disease with no cure. The answer
has come down to us from those first legendary lovers, Tristan and Isolde,
themselves:
And so he
[Tristan] came to the heart of the word: l’ameir, l’amour—to which he answered: “Oh my lovely
one, so it is, also, with me: l’ameir and you: you are my torment. Isolt dear, queen of my heart,
you alone and my love for you have undone and robbed me of my wits. I have gone
so completely astray that I shall never again be restored. There is in this
entire world nothing dear to my heart but you.” Isolt replied: “Sire, and so
you are to me.”
“And since
the lovers now realized that there was between them just one mind, one heart,
and one will, their pain began at the same time to subside and to come to
light. Each regarded and addressed the other more boldly: the man, the maid;
the maid, the man: the sense of difference between them was gone. He kissed her
and she kissed him, lovingly, sweetly; and that, for Love’s cure, was a delightful start.”
What the
psychiatric critics of “romantic love” don’t know when they charge that it’s a
disease, is that there ain’t no cure for “love,” for amor, or, to put it in a positive way, the
only cure for the disease of love is love. One of the greatest of the Provencal
poetical masters, Bernart de Ventadorn (c. 1150-1200?) put it best:
This
love smites me so gently
At
heart and with such sweet savor!
Of
grief do I die one hundred times a day,
And
of joy revive, again a hundred.
My
malady, indeed, is of excellent kind;
More
worth, this malady, than any other good:
And
since my malady is so good for me,
Good,
after the malady, will be its cure.
Though we have
come a long way past the initial revolutionary stage of “love in the Western
world” (making even marriage an arena wherein “romantic love” can play itself
out), the Troubadour’s challenge with “romantic love”—amor—still seems relevant: “here it is,
what are you going to do about it,” because it ain’t going away and because
there ain’t no cure for love or lovers.
5. Ain’t No Cure for Love
In conclusion,
the Gypsy Scholar’s previous essay, “Introduction and Overview” to the
Troubadours & the Beloved series, suggested that our Valentine’s
celebration of romantic love still retains dim vestiges of an ancient and deeper
tradition, which was identified as that of eros.
While it would be premature to give the arguments for this here, suffice
to say that our notion—still highly regarded by some lovers
today—of “true love” comes from the Troubadour conception, which (as
mentioned above) was called fin’amors, and it had its own code. We have, to some extent, the amors, but we don’t have the fin’, which reflects the code. (Again, fin’amors means “refined-” or “sublime”
love.) The “ideal” in courtly love
(and, again, the was an ideal that not every knight or troubadour attained) was
self-renunciation through service to the Beloved. (And, that “Beloved” may not have been taken literally in
the poetry/songs of the Troubadours.)
The unattainable Lady could be pursued but she couldn’t be forced; her
grace or her gifts she must be willingly bestowed on her lover, if he won her
favor. “Jealously” was a cardinal
vice in this code of love; for even if courtship included sensuality, the lover
had no right to possession. Thus, though
we no longer have a romantic love with a code, we may take a lesson here. This brings the Gypsy Scholar to the
last polemical argument in defense of romantic love.
Some of “romantic love’s” critics like
to portray the Troubadours as head-in-the-clouds poets who could believe in
their ideal of love and their beloved—the Rose—because they looked
at the world through rose-colored glasses, knowing nothing of the real world
and its harsh realities. But as Campbell points out:
Now it
is a matter of no small moment that in the period of this idyllic poetry the
world of harsh reality should have been about as dangerous and unlikely a
domicile for amor as
the nightmare of history has ever produced. We have mentioned the devastation
of southern France. The whole of Central Europe likewise was in a state of
hideous turmoil.
He cites the
example of one Troubadour, Gottfried who tells his listeners, that though love
is the very being of life, it is everywhere brutalized. I repeat it here to close my
essay, because it reminds of something one of our presidential appointees
recently said that created such a stir in the media. It was that “Americans are a nation of cowards.” (The Troubadour “code of love” that
made courage a primary virtue, along with a sense of honor, trueness, and
integrity. Romance was a social code and individual determination of courage,
fidelity, and relationships were important to life and justice.) This polemic has been directed at the
critics of romantic love. But now
the Gypsy Scholar will turn the tables on them and end with a criticism, but of
a different kind. The charge of cowardliness is cited here because not only
does the Gypsy Scholar feel that it accounts for the attitude of anti-romantic
critics dealt with in this essay, but, to a certain extent, with few
exceptions, it indicts all of us—the Gypsy Scholar included.
I pity Love
[he writes] with all my heart; for though almost all today hold and cleave to
her, no one concedes to her due. We all want our pleasure of her, and to
consort with her. But no! Love is not what we, with our deceptions, are now
making of her for each other. We are going at things the wrong way. We sow
black henbane, then expect to reap lilies and roses. But believe me, that
cannot be. . . .
It is real1y
true, what they say, "Love is harried and hounded to the ends of the
earth." All that we possess of her is the word, the name alone remains to
us; and that, too, we have so bandied about, misused and vulgarized, that the
poor thing is ashamed of her name, disgusted with the very sound of it. She is
cringing and flinching everywhere at her own existence. Misused and dishonored,
she sneaks begging from house to house, lugging shamefully a sack all of
patches, crammed with her swag and booty, which she denies to her own mouth,
and offers for sale in the streets. Alas! It is we who have created that
market. We traffic with her in this amazing way and claim then to be innocent.
Love, the queen of all hearts, the free-born, the one and only, is up for public
sale! What a shameful tribute is this that our mastery has required of her! . .
We
cultivate love with embittered minds, with lies, and with deceit, and then
expect from her joy of body and heart: but instead, she bears only pain,
corruption, evil fruit, and blight—as her soil was sown.
Or, as the song goes, thinking of
Valentine’s Day again: “Everybody wants a box of chocolates / And a
long-stemmed rose / And everybody knows.”
6. Everybody Knows