Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Greek manners and Gothic morals

Why is it called "Adultery" since it makes us act like children
As I have said before, the claim by CS Lewis that courtly love represents a new kind of sentiment is ludicrous. In its place I'd make the more humble claim that the Provençal troubadours emphasized love as an heroic pursuit to a decree and with a consistency that was previously unknown.

A brief digression, in discussing and dismissing possible precedents, Lewis does not mention the Islamic culture of the Moors. It too was a culture in which there was a fairly large class of men with sufficient culture to sit around and produce music and poetry but who would have had little chance for love because other, more powerful, men and polygamy would have closed that door to them.

I do not have the time and, in any case, no one has the evidence necessary to prove or refute such a claim. But for my purpose now it is enough to consider the thing that Lewis does not and that is that any domestic male culture wherein actual love is difficult to achieve will have a tendency to romanticize and glorify love. And it seems to me that is all courtly love was, a way of talking about something people did not have.

What makes Lewis interesting here is an argument he makes about the form this "new" love took. For although he insists that there is a new emotion without precedent, he does think that the social norms that grew up around it have precedents. These norms are,
  • Humility
  • Courtesy
  • Adultery
  • The Religion of Love.
Okay, let's play Sesame Street, which of these things just doesn't seem to belong with the others? You got it, adultery. How did it get into the mix?

Lewis doesn't really explain that. What he sets out to explain is why love wasn't associated with marriage. And he gives two answers. The first is that the conventions of feudal marriage had nothing to do with love.  That's true enough. The second is that medieval sexology (his word) has a weird catch 22 built into it that, while allowing that sex was a good, made any actual sex act evil.

He's right about the second point. The churchmen of the middle ages—and the only people writing about love and sex were churchmen—had three good reasons for disdaining sex. The first was that the early church writers had an apocalyptic worldview. Jesus was coming any day so don't waste your time on sex and marriage. Second, they had the classic literature that treated the pursuit of sexual love as a trivial and base thing separate from real heroism which lay elsewhere. To this they had added their own twist, which was the belief that the best way to honour God was to live a life that was entirely devoted to devotion. And this is what they lived in monasteries.

The challenge sex presented to this was not unique. I've mentioned  The Pearl before. In this poem a man mourning his dead daughter comes to fear that he has come to love her image more than God and thereby has sinned. Sex presented the same sort of challenge. It too was a passion and it threatened to distract people from God.

It's important to note that the monastics did dishes like everyone else. They did lots of things that might have distracted them from God. They solved that problem by making these activities into prayers. Scrubbing the burnt pot or weeding the garden were ways to worship God. They also had pleasures and they saw them the same. A beautiful rose or a delicious piece of bread and even a glass of wine were all gifts from God and it was an act of devotion to enjoy them.

And sex ultimately has to be a good thing. To say otherwise would be to treat God more like a gnostic demiurge who had made a perverse thing. The trick was to somehow distinguish the desire for the pleasure of sex from the actual pleasure. It gets to be a little like the old rule about administering opiates to patients in pain. The opiate is good; it is, in fact, the best pain reliever available. But it is also addictive so when a patient starts asking for it that might be a sign of nascent addiction.

And we should pause to note that this move requires the moralist to debase sexual passion. Here the moralist must see eye-to-eye with the pornographer. Sexual passion must all be the same and it must all be an empty animal lust. The fact that your desire was for someone you were married to didn't make it any different from love for a prostitute or a picture.

For the medieval moralist it was not only possible, odd as this may seem, for a man to commit adultery with his wife it was almost inevitable that he would. For no matter how he tried, he couldn't separate his desire for sex (which was a sin) from the actual pleasure (which was a gift from God). And I should add that the Internet is full of traditionalist Catholics who still think this.

Okay, that might give us some hint of why this culture of love didn't attach love to marriage. Might! But why would it attach to adultery. Here Lewis pulls a fast one. He assumes that having shown why it is not M, the answer must be A. But that doesn't follow at all. Something for next time.

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